The Sum of Our Choices

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Action and thrills from 1934 to 2025.

THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934)

Ah, the good ol’ days, when a movie could tell an entire spy thriller plot in just 75 minutes. That’s the running time of the Alfred Hitchcock classic The Man Who Knew Too Much, which Hitchcock directed from a script crafted by Charles Bennett, D. B. Wyndham-Lewis, Edwin Greenwood, and A. R. Rawlinson.

The story begins with the Lawrences, a British family consisting of married couple Bob and Jill (Leslie Banks and Edna Best) and their young daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam), on vacating in the mountains of Switzerland – a vacation that’s so busy, Jill has even enrolled in a clay pigeon shooting contest in the midst of it. Jill loses the contest to sharpshooter Ramon Levine (Frank Vosper), but that doesn’t deter her from deciding to dance the night away. Bad luck: her friend Louis Bernard (Pierre Fresnay) gets shot and killed while Jill is dancing with him.

Louis uses his dying breath to tell Jill about a note, which she and Bob discover has information of a crime that’s expected to take place back in London. Ramon is going to shoot a European head of state during a concert at the Royal Albert Hall – and since Bob and Jill know something’s going to happen, Ramon’s employers kidnap young Betty.

Back in London, Bob takes it upon himself to investigate the villains (one of whom is played by the legendary Peter Lorre), hopefully rescue Betty, and maybe even thwart the assassination in the process. Thrilling sequences, fights, and even a large scale shootout ensue, and in the end, Jill gets a chance to redeem her loss at the shooting contest.

Hitchcock has said that The Man Who Knew Too Much is the work of “a talented amateur,” which is why he decided to remake the movie himself twenty-two years later, so he could have another try as “a professional.” But he was quite an impressive craftsman even at the amateur level (and let's not overlook the fact that this was already his fifteenth feature film), so his original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much still holds up on its own. 

Sure, not every scene works quite as well as it could have or should have, but there are some stunning moments in here as well. People weren't kidding around when they named Hitchcock the Master of Suspense. They may not have given him that title yet in 1934, but he was already living up to it.

KARATE RAIDER (1995)

Filmmaker Joe Carnahan has worked on some high-profile projects and well-known movies like Smokin’ Aces, The A-Team, The Grey, the Netflix release The Rip, Bad Boys for Life, and the Death Wish remake (and there was a time when he was going to direct Mission: Impossible III). He took his very first step into the entertainment industry by selling an action screenplay called Stray Trigger or something like that (he can’t quite remember), which centered on a love triangle involving a cop, a criminal, and a psychiatrist – and this was long before The Departed. Unfortunately, we never got to see Carnahan’s take on that scenario, because his script was turned into a vehicle for martial arts action star Ronald L. Marchini, who Carnahan describes as being a level below “a poor man’s Chuck Norris,” and Marchini did a rewrite that completely changed the story. Carnahan still gets a writing credit on the finished film, titled Karate Raider, but there is no love triangle involving a cop, a criminal, and a psychiatrist.

Directed by Marchini and Charlie Ordoñez, the film draws inspiration from the Indiana Jones franchise, which is evident in the title, the jungle setting, and the fact that Marchini wears a rather Jonesian hat while playing the lead character, Jake Turner. But those elements are the closest Karate Raider ever gets to Indiana Jones territory.

Turner, who is a former government operative, is informed by his Vietnam-buddy-turned-government-agent-pal Bill Digger (Joe Estevez) that the daughter of their former Marine Sergeant, a Drug Enforcement officer named Jennifer Boynton (Shelly Gaunt), has been captured by a drug lord (Joe Meyer as Pike) and is being held prisoner in the jungles of Colombia. So Turner sets out to rescue her.

Made on a budget of “Dirt Cheap,” Karate Raider attempts to have some thrilling action sequences, but thrills are hard to find in this one. Nothing in here works really well... which is part of its charm and why it’s worth seeking out for fans of bad B-movies, because that’s exactly what this is. The Carnahan factor adds a strong curiosity level, even though it seems like Marchini wrote any trace of Carnahan out of the script, and there’s some entertainment to be derived from how goofy Marchini looks in his sub-Indiana Jones outfit.

Add in a Burt Ward cameo, and you’ve got the makings of a bad movie good time.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING (2025)

There was a time when the James Bond and Mission: Impossible movies were two of my primary cinematic obsessions and the idea that I would skip seeing the latest entries on the big screen would have been unthinkable... but then, the filmmakers managed to drive them both into the ground. Bond lost me by rehashing old ideas while becoming overly serious and self-important. I opted not to see No Time to Die in the theatre. Bloated running times didn’t help: that slog was 163 minutes. When I saw that Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning had a running time of 170 minutes, I decided to skip it, too. And now that I caught up with it, I’m glad I didn’t subject myself to this in the theatre – because, like No Time to Die, it’s an overly serious, self-important, ridiculously long slog.

I loved this series when it was taking the “director’s showcase” approach. Brian De Palma, John Wood, J.J. Abrams, and Brad Bird all brought distinct visions to the first four installments. But then it became the Christopher McQuarrie show, with McQuarrie directing and co-writing four sequels in a row... and proving in the process that fresh blood is necessary. He clearly did not have enough ideas to make as many of these movies as he did. He definitely didn’t have enough ideas for the two movie “finale” of Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning.

For a movie that had a budget somewhere in the range of 300 to 400 million, The Final Reckoning often feels shockingly similar to a cheapie from the grindhouse / drive-in era. Sure, it’s all very glossy-looking and there are some large-scale action sequences, but the majority of the 170 minute running time is taken up by a mixture of stock footage flashbacks to moments from the previous seven films and scene after scene of characters having very serious, very important, very dull conversations.

The threat carries over from Dead Reckoning: A Russian submarine was equipped with an AI defense and navigation system called The Entity, an AI system that gained sentience and sabotaged the submarine. Now the sub lies at the bottom of the sea somewhere while The Entity corrupts the Internet. The Entity can be controlled with a cruciform key, and various governments and organizations are hoping to gain control of The Entity and use it for their own purposes. Realizing the danger of this AI, secret agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) plans to destroy it. He got his hands on the cruciform key by the end of Dead Reckoning, and in The Final Reckoning his quest to destroy The Entity before it can start launching nukes takes him from London to Virginia to the sunken submarine to South Africa.

It takes a long time for anything interesting to happen in the movie, and almost to the end before we get a really cool action sequence. McQuarrie and Cruise went back to the early days of cinema for a climactic train sequence in Dead Reckoning, and they do the same with a biplane sequence in this one. That’s neat, but not much else about the movie is.

Ethan is aided on his quest by a team that consists of Hayley Atwell as pickpocket Grace, Simon Pegg as the tech-minded Benji Dunn, Pom Klementieff as assassin Paris, Greg Tarzan Davis as rogue U.S. Intelligence agent Theo Degas, and Ving Rhams as hacker Luther Stickell, who is needlessly killed off early on. Rhames has been in every one of these movies with Cruise, and it was a bummer to see him exit.

Ethan himself is quite dull in this movie, even though people keep talking him up as the Greatest and Most Important Hero to Ever Exist. After Dead Reckoning, I said “I do hope (The Final Reckoning) will be a bit shorter and will have much less talk about how scary The Entity is.” But it went seven minutes longer and doubled down on the chatter. I stopped caring what was going on in the movie long before the credits rolled.

I didn’t have a good time with this one, which may or may not be the end of the Mission: Impossible film franchise (for now). But instead of being the end of the series, I’d rather this just be the too-long-delayed end of McQuarrie’s run on it. I think we could still get some fun, exciting Mission: Impossible movies with different directors at the helm.

DIRTY ANGELS (2024)

Almost twenty years after working together on the excellent James Bond movie Casino Royale, director Martin Campbell and actress Eva Green reteamed for the middling action thriller Dirty Angels, which sees Green taking on a role that couldn’t be further from the one she played opposite Bond. In Casino Royale, she was the girl from the British Treasury who walked around in glamorous dresses and broke Bond’s heart. Here, she’s a battle-hardened soldier called Jake.

When a group of terrorists storms a girls' school in Quetta, Pakistan and abducts several students, including a couple of girls with high-ranking parents, Jake is called in to conduct a rescue mission alongside Travis (Christopher Backus), Dr. Mike (Edmund Kingsley), and a group of women: Ruby Rose as Medic, Maria Bakalova as The Bomb, Rona-Lee Shimon as Mechanic, Jojo T. Gibbs as Geek, and Emily Bruni as Shooter. The lack of names is due to the fact that Jake wants to know what their function is, not who they are as a person – and writers Alissa Sullivan Haggis and Jonas McCord didn’t give the audience much reason to care about these characters, either. I was disappointed at the lack of interesting personalities.

The team poses as medical personnel to get into the area where the terrorists are holding the hostages, then a series of action sequences play out. Campbell has made some great action movies (especially Casino Royale and his other Bond movie, GoldenEye), but Dirty Angels is never able to reach that level. It’s never as exciting or interesting as it should be, and the thrills are few and far between. Somehow, despite the intensity of the subject matter, it manages to fall flat most of the time.

But if you’re interested in seeing Martin Campbell and Eva Green reunited, it’s a serviceable action movie that will only take up 104 minutes of your time.