Bricking on Rapp

Quandary day at work yesterday when I was presented with a fairly serious ethical dilemma that I swore I wouldn’t talk about so I won’t.  I’ve found civilian life brings a larger amount of these type issues but at least the civilians are pretty upfront about being less than honorable.  The same type thing happened in the military but the perpetrators were forced further underground because of the stigma attached to honorable challenged behavior.  Tough day.

The day certainly brightened when I returned home to my favorite Panamanian.  She’s a great sounding board and the only one I could share the dilemma with.  Last night was date night number two as well.  We went to see Brick Mansions which is the last movie Paul Walker had completed before his untimely death. 

I think this movie would have gone directly to DVD instead of the theaters if not for his death.  It’s a Luc Besson (whom I love) product so there was a lot of action as well as French speaking actors trying unsuccessfully to hide their accents as Detroit politicians.  Since this was set in the future maybe the Québécois migrated south to fill the vacuum that is Detroit since the Americans gave up on it.

The nasty bits of Detroit are surrounded by a huge wall and the action involves Walker as a driven cop assisted by a parkour dude trying to take down RZA (who seems to be channeling Elmer Fudd with a pronounced lisp) who stumbled upon a neutron bomb (because those are just lying around).  The plot is more than silly and boasts a fairly high unintentional comedy level but is rescued by David Belle.  The movie is worth seeing just to see this guy bouncing all over the urban landscape with incredible parkour moves.  It’s always a stretch for Walker to play a tough guy as it is here but Belle is mesmerizing to watch.  It was like Cirque de Soleil on amphetamines cross bred with martial arts.  It was also Besson so the action just rocked while not making a lot of sense, I loved it.

I also finished off my latest Vince Flynn book, Kill Shot, featuring one of my new favorite heroes, Mitch Rapp.  I blew through this in typical Thor-Flynn mode and found it very entertaining.  Rapp is set up during a Pairs assassination assignment and spends the book trying to figure out who to trust.  You do not want to be a guy he decides not to trust. 

I learned the Flynn wrote this book as well as the first one I read, American Assassin, after he’d published a whole slew of books featuring Rapp.  These first two books take place earlier, chronologically speaking, in Rapp’s career and provide some background on the established character.  I think I’m lucky having discovered Rapp and Flynn after he completed this arc.  I am intensely grateful to the friend who clued me in on Vince Flynn.

For those of you concerned about Buddy's collision yesterday, he has rebounded nicely.  He conducted another squirrel interdiction mission this morning with a great deal more success. Success being measured by lack of full speed contact with metal poles if not capture of the actual rodent.