Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (USA, 1942)

"The needle to the last, eh, Holmes?"

 Professor Moriarty (Lionel Atwill)

Without doubt, one of the worst of all the Universal Holmes films. The fourth film in the 14 film series — assuming you count the first two 19th-century-set 20th Century Fox productions, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939 / trailer) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939 / trailer), and not just the subsequent 12 films set in the 20th century made by Universal once they gained control of the characters — almost everyone involved in the project does such a lackluster turn that one could easily believe that The Secret Weapon was one of the last of the series, made when all those involved had run out of steam.

Trailer to

Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon:

True, both Nigel Bruce (14 Feb 1895 – 8 Oct 1953) and Basil Rathbone ([13 Jun 1892 – 21 Jul 1967] of Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet [1965]) do a mildly competent turn, but unlike in such films as The Scarlet Claw (1944 / trailer) or The Spider Woman (1944 / trailer), or even the earlier entry The Voice of Terror (1942), there doesn't seem to be any spark between them, and they often seem on automatic pilot.

Likewise, in his first outing in the series he was thereafter forever to helm, Roy William Neill (4 Sept 1887 – 14 Dec 1946) displays little of the directorial talent that has since earned him delayed respect as a precursor of film noir. Here, his careful staging, lighting and composition are oddly lifeless and sleep-inducing, displaying all the care and creativity of a Poverty Row hack director, not one of Hollywood's practiced stalwarts. The B&W photography of the movie is as equally undistinguished as the direction, seemingly consisting of nothing more than a few shades of washed-out gray — but then, the version of The Secret Weapon we screened was one of the un-restored, public domain versions, so perhaps the disappointing cinematography can be blamed on the degraded quality of the film copy itself.

Still, considering how creative and narratively interesting some of the later entries of the series are, this early entry in the low-budget series has all the life of an assembly line job in which neither creativity nor motivation was required: The Secret Weapon feels very much like a bad excuse to keep a number of actors employed while simultaneously filling the studios bank account with the proceeds generated by a guaranteed audience. That said, as we pointed out in our review of the preceding film of the franchise, The Voice of Terror (1942), "like so many classic programmers and low budget Universal movies, all of the Rathbone/Bruce movies exude that special something that makes them eternally watchable and fun despite their often glaring flaws, especially if you're a fan of old movies and you're watching the restored versions." (Just expect less watchability and fun than found in some of the other Rathbone/Bruce programmers.)

Like The Secret Weapon, the previous, roughly five-month earlier entry, The Secret Weapon is a wartime effort and more than slightly propagandistic; indeed, this piece of celluloid presents Holmes (Rathbone) less as a brilliant detective than as some sort of loyal English spy. Undoubtedly, those who watched the movie back in 1942 knew, deep in their hearts, that Great Britain would never fall to the nasty Nazis as long as they had intrepid, loyal countrymen like Sherlock Holmes at their side...

Credited as based on the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's short story The Adventure of the Dancing Men, the "adaptation" as provided by W. Scott Darling* (28 May 1898 – 29 Oct 1951), Edward T. Lowe Jr** (29 Jun 1890 – 17 Apr 1973) and Edmund L. Hartmann*** (24 Sept. 1911 – 28 Nov 2003) retains little from that tale other than a letter written in a "dancing-man" code.
* Canada-born William Scott Darling began his Hollywood career as the writer on what is thought to be the longest-lasting adventure serial ever, The Hazards of Helen (119 twelve-minute [mostly now lost] episodes between 1914 and 1917, each an individual and closed 12-minute melodrama and not ending on a cliffhanger). His subsequent career includes a stint directing silents, but he remained primarily a scriptwriter — for example, he worked on The Spider (1945 / full movie), Weird Woman (1944 / trailer) and The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942 / trailer). "He gradually gained a reputation as something of an extremely prolific hack screenwriter. By the 1940s he was largely employed by Universal and today is blamed by film buffs for scripting several of the worst Laurel and Hardy features." In 1951, while in the midst of divorcing his second wife Eleanor Fried (9 Jun 1891 – 14 Oct 1965) — she filed, not he — Darling parked his car at the beach, left the keys in the ignition, and went for a fully-clothed swim, whence he never returned. His wallet was found floating before he was...
** After directing his first and only movie, a possibly lost short titled The Losing Game (1915), Lowe turned to writing and worked on some 130-plus movies between 1913 and 1947, mostly programmers, including The Vampire Bat (1933) and The House of Frankenstein (1945), not to mention the original 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (full film).
*** Hartmann possibly achieved greatest respectability (and the most money) as the producer of TV shows — My Three Sons (1962-72), anyone? — but we here at a wasted life respect him for his work on Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1943 / trailer, with Turhan Bey), Black Friday (1940 / trailer) and William Beaudine's The Face of Marble (1946 / full film).

The Secret Weapon opens with Sherlock Holmes in (an unconvincing) Switzerland using his ability at disguise to hoodwink some Nazi spies who are out to kidnap a local scientist, Dr. Tobel (William Post, Jr. [19 Feb 1901 – 26 Sept 1989]), the inventor of a revolutionary aiming devise for airplane bombers. Holmes even uses their automobile to help smuggle the good doctor out of the country and into England, where the man just happens to have a girlfriend, Charlotte Eberli (played by Kaaren Verne* [6 Apr 1918 – 23 Dec 1967]), who does little in the film other than to look interested in what other people have to say. Of course, Tobel soon disappears, having walked into the clutches of the evil Dr. Moriarty (Lionel "Pinky" Atwill of The Vampire Bat [1933], House of Frankenstein [1944] and so much more), who wants the Secret Weapon for the Nazis, who are willing to pay him a lot of money for it. Soon three of the four scientists that Tobel contracted to build the separate parts of the single weapon are all dead and it is up to Holmes to decipher Tobel's last encoded message and find out who the fourth scientist is — it's Professor Frederick Hoffner (an uncredited Henry Victor [2 Oct 1892 – 15 Mar 1945] of Freaks [1932 / Violet & Daisy] and King of the Zombies [1941 / trailer]) — before Moriarty does...
* Kaaren/Karen Verne, born Ingeborg Greta Katerina Marie-Rose Klinckerfuss in Berlin, fled Nazi Germany in 1938. The second of her three (possibly four) marriages was to Peter Lorre (26 Jun 1904 – 23 Mar 1964), whom she met while filming All through the Night (1942 / trailer); during their turbulent five years together they had a son and she tried to commit suicide several times. After their divorce, her career slowly petered out and many of her appearance were short and uncredited (for example, as a stewardess in The Torn Curtain [1966 / trailer]). The cause of her death appears to be contentious: some sources say she died of a heart ailment, others that she finally succeeded at killing herself.

The Secret Weapon features the debut of Dennis Hoey ([30 Mar 1893 – 25 Jul 1960] of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man [1943 / trailer] and She-Wolf of London [1946 / trailer]) as Inspector Lestrade, the Scotland Yard detective. His character was to rival Watson as the comic relief in a total of six of the franchise movies, and here, stumbling along three steps behind Holmes but abreast with Dr. Watson, his affable if somewhat dense character is extremely likeable. 

The movie also features the return to the series of Lionel "Pinky" Atwill (1 Mar 1885 – 22 Apr 1946) as Dr. Moriarty — he played a Dr Mortimor in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939 / trailer) — and his pleasingly evil baritone and perfect diction are, as always, a pleasure.* Both he and Hoey are among the true highlights of this otherwise lackluster film — still, despite Hoey's Lestrade and Atwill's Moriarty, and contrary to popular wisdom, there are indeed lousy Sherlock Holmes films, and The Secret Weapon is one of them. While it might not need to be avoided, it is perhaps not the one to watch if you are new to the series, as it could well put you off to watching more of them. Which would be a shame, for on the whole the Rathbone/Bruce series is immensely entertaining on numerous levels.
* According to Hollywood scandal historians, including the ubiquitous Kenneth Anger (3 Feb 1927 – 11 May 2003), by the time Atwill appeared in The Secret Weapon, he was doomed to substandard and B films because of the situation he found himself in at the time: after two years of continuous court cases related to a sex scandal, Atwill had just pleaded guilty to charges of perjury in a deal with the city prosecutor that called for the dropping of all moral charges resulting from one of his infamous bacchanalian parties. (Let's hear it for sado-masochism, cross-dressing, and group sex!) Placed on five-year probation on 15 October 1942, Atwill faced an unofficial blacklisting from the studios bending to an unwritten rule of the Hays Office which stipulated that neither criminals nor probated persons could be employed. After seven months of unemployment, Atwill managed to get his probation annulled and returned to gainful employment, but now only amongst the B studios and in second rate serials, slowly sinking into Poverty Row obscurity. A nicely scandalous story, but here at a wasted life we might argue that Atwill was primarily a B-movie staple in the first place, his excursions into A films more the exception than rule, and he also managed to make a lot of movies during the period he was supposedly unemployable — the scandal served less to ruin Atwill's career than simply magnify a slide already underway.

Sherlock Holmes & The Secret Weapon —

full movie:

The First Myth: The Clash of Gods / Feng shen bang: Jue zhan wan xian zhen (China, 2021)

 

Well, that was a waste of time. A battle film, from start to finish, and one that comes with a heavy, heavy sense of déjà vu: anyone who has ever seen any of the Marvel Avengers movies will surely recognize a scene or two or five or more, not to mention whole concepts. Basically, The First Myth: The Clash of the Gods is pretty much the Avengers dressed in mythic, wuxia trappings but, if you can imagine it even possible, with less depth and character development, more illogic and discontinuity, and a lot more of the kind of CGI that makes you think you are watching a cheap animated movie.

Trailer to

The First Myth – The Clash of Gods:

The movie begins with a battle and ends with a battle, and in between there are battles. For all the action, however, The Clash of the Gods remains amazingly dull and uninteresting, listlessly going from one familiar set piece to the next. A token non-action scene pops up here and there to explain this or that or offer a facsimile of character growth or humor or human emotion or motivation, but little of the extraneous non-battle scenes do anything to make the story any more comprehensible, though they are sometimes a bit more interesting than the repetitive fight scenes. People — to be exact: gods — come and go, mostly out of the blue and especially towards the big but uninvolving climactic battle, but the focus of the movie is generally on the main assembly of five, sometimes six. 

We admit that we are not 100% sure that we have all the names right, but the movie's Hulk is Ne Zha (Zhang Zhi Lu), only here the hapless human changes into a winging quasi-gargoyle that looks like a refugee from I, Frankenstein (2014 / trailer), a likewise crappy movie but one with better CGI. General Deng (Maggie Lee a.k.a. Qinyao Li) is the Black Widow of the movie, not quite as fan-boy wet-dream sexy as Scarlett Johansson's interpretation but just as deadly and unstoppable, almost superhuman despite being human. Yang Jian (Samual Chan) is an Iron Man figure with a Vision-like mind stone on his forehead and is the nominal leader of the bickering group, which must learn to fight together.

For reasons of political correctness — Not! — the Thor figure, named Tu Xing Sun, who has a golden rope instead of a hammer and can burrow underground like moleman, is played for laughs by a thespian-challenged little-person (Han Meng Wu). The movie's highlight, as in best-acted and most fun to watch, is the secondary bad guy, the Loki figure named Sheng Guo Bao (Ma Wen Bo), whose giant demon panther becomes quite a pussycat after it gets its ass properly kicked. (One really cannot help but laugh loudly when, captured, Bao gets tossed into a jail cell with barred door made of tree branches. He's frigging wizard, for gawd's sake.) 

There is also a Captain America figure of sorts as well as an Agent Coulson character, not to mention a Nick Fury type, though in this case he is not Black but an aged wizard who looks a bit like an Asian Gandalf. The skinny bad-guy god in the sky (Paul Che of Till Death Do We Scare [ / scene], Ghost Hospital [2016 / trailer], Tales from the Occult [2022 / trailer], the bat-shit crazy Coffin Homes [2022 / trailer], the bat-shit crazy Asian reboot of Anaconda [2024 / trailer] and way more) is the movie's Saruman cum The Other cum Thanos, so of course he wants to destroy humanity...

 

All in all, there is really no reason to bother with The First Myth: The Clash of Gods. Sure, the wuxia elements are intriguing, but dressing up a flogged-dead horse does not really hide the stench of over-familiarity. That said, over-familiarity often helps make the movie easier to follow: despite the one-note simplicity of the narrative — battle after battle as good deities and people vs. bad deities out to destroy humanity — the movie has a lot of those big jumps found so often in contemporary Asian fantasy flicks that make the viewer think that either some important scenes have been cut (perhaps we're watching two movies cut down into one?*) or that one must have temporarily dozed off for a bit. But what transpires on screen in The First Myth: The Clash of Gods is never interesting enough to make one want to hit rewind to check. Instead, one just wants the whole thing to get over with and end.

* Nope.

The London Nobody Knows (Brexitland, 1969)

(Full move at the Internet Archives.) At slightly less than a full hour in length, The London Nobody Knows is relatively short documentary shot in March 1967 by Norman Cohen (11 June 1936 – 26 Oct 1983), a Ireland-born producer and director better known (if at all) for specializing in lowbrow British comedies like Confessions of a Pop Performer (1975 / trailer), Confessions of a Driving Instructor (1976 / trailer) Stand Up, Virgin Soldiers (1977 / full movie), and/or Confessions from a Holiday Camp (1977 / trailer).

London Nobody Knows Excerpt:

Some five year prior to this mostly forgotten documentary here, Cohen had co-directed, along with Arnold L. Miller (20 Oct 1922 – 26 Apr 2014), the Stanley Long-produced full-color dullumentary London in the Raw (1964 / trailer / full film).* But if that Mondo Cane (1962 / trailer)-inspired "shockumentary" wallowed happily — if condescendingly — in the inanities of yesterday's London and cast but a rare glance at the city's truly non-glamorous, The London Nobody Knows casts its eye above all upon the lost and overlooked, the working class, and the lower echelons. And but for an oddly out-of-place, almost Monty-Pythonesque interlude involving S Behr and Mathew Ltd egg-cracking factory in Borough High Street, London, the humor is dry and definitely outweighed by somber respect.

* As perhaps to be expected, London in the Raw was a financial success, so the following year Stanley Long (producer and cinematography) and Arnold L. Miller (but not Cohen) returned with Primitive London (1965 / trailer). Miller & Long worked together and apart on numerous fine and not-so-fine British mondos and trash and exploitation movies, including The Blood Beast Terror (1968 / trailer) and The Sorcerers (1967 / trailer), but Miller's crowning achievement as an exploitation producer is surely the depressing classic Witchfinder General (1968). 

Not from the film —

short documentary on work at S Behr and Mathew Ltd:

The London Nobody Knows is based on the British artist and writer Geoffrey S. Fletcher's eponymous book from 1962,* for which Norman Cohen hired Brian Comport** to flesh out a screenplay and James Mason (15 May 1909 – 27 Jul 1984) to act as the documentary's neatly dressed onscreen host and commentator. Mason's presence, while enjoyable and hardly detrimental, is somewhat beside the point as it is not his presence but the city itself and the things shown that make the documentary interesting. (Okay, the timbre of his voice is pleasing, but a pleasant voice does not require a star presence.) Most of what was already in the shadows or on its way to oblivion when this film was made is now long gone (or irrevocably different), and therein lies the true appeal of the movie. It is a wonderfully fascinating look at a place and world most of us have never seen, and whether or not you are from London is rather immaterial in this regard.

* "Fletcher was drawn to the undervalued, the ugly, the decrepit — he liked stuttering gas lamps, cast-iron lavatories and railway yards, the urban poetry of dereliction. He was dismayed by the rise of office blocks and the gung-ho redevelopment which would stamp out, he correctly predicted, 'the tawdry, extravagant and eccentric'. The London he loved was disappearing fast — it was a Victorian city still, but one that had been blown to smithereens by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz. It was very much a post-war city, with bomb sites and widespread neglect and decay. It was shabby and beautiful and full of accumulated detail. [...] [The Glue Factory]"

** Brian Comport (16 Apr 1938 – 5 Sept 2013) subsequently had a short, splashy period in British genre films, producing the screenplays for a quick succession of cult films: Freddie Francis's Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny & Girly (1970 / trailer), Pete Walker's Man of Violence (1970 / trailer), Robert Hartford-Davis's Beware My Brethren (1972 / trailer) and Peter Newbrook's The Asphyx (1972).

The London Nobody Knows —

Chapel Market, Islington:

Opening with a short discourse on the dangers of Modernist architecture — a misdirected discourse, as it is not Modernist architecture that is the danger to urban residents, but office buildings of any style — we join Mason in the ruins of the Bedford Theatre in Camden, a prime if typical example of how the splendor of the past can so easily become the refuse of today, doomed for demolition. 

Here, as so often, Mason's neat appearance is a sharp contrast to the decay around him. We follow him as he strolls around the city, from one working class street market to the other; from the then-still-unchanged backyard where Jack the Ripper's second [canonical] victim, Annie Chapman nee Eliza Ann Smith (25 Sept 1840 – 8 Sept 1888) was found to Clink Street, the former location of Clink Prison, the jail that gave us the slang phrase, "in the clink"; from a Salvation Army soup kitchen to what is now the Roundhouse theater but was then the deserted railway engine shed with railway turntable; from a fabulous underground urinal with fish tanks to the previously mentioned egg-cracking factory...

Along the way, Mason chats with the down-and-out as well as some street buskers — one of whom seems to sing in Yiddish, the other of whom does a demented tap dance to guitar accompaniment* — and comments upon the homeless and methylated-spirits-swilling alcoholics that can be counted among those who are the forgotten, the lost, the overlooked, the ignored, the doomed. The methylated-spirits-swilling alcoholics and a live-eel segment treads mighty close to shockumentary territory, but the film is a bit too genteel to go the full monty in that direction — to its advantage.

* Neither busker has anything to do with the other. The first carries himself and performs as if he may have once had a career at least on the sidelines of the lowbrow stages. The other is "Norman Norris a.k.a. Lord Mustard [...]. In later years he became a well-known street entertainer in Oxford, often going by the names Captain Tap or Colonel Mustard. Born in Glasgow in 1911 as George Pirie, he took the name of Alastair MacDonald as his stage name and traveled the country as an entertainer. He claimed to have worked with Norman Wisdom, and to have won the Bognor Regis Opportunity Knocks contest in 1981. He said in a newspaper interview 'I taught myself to tap dance as a boy and also do gurning [making strange faces]. Mostly I entertain to raise money for charity — I was once a living legend in London. [The Glue Factory]"

John Johnstone (b.1941) Lord Mustard (1963)
Busking in London:

Comport and Cohen never fill Mason's mouth with acrimonious statements of blame, accusation or pity, preferring instead to let the images and people speak for themselves. The result is gloomy, to say the least, as most of the people presented — like most of the building and places visited in the documentary — so obviously have no upwards in their futures. But at the same time, The London Nobody Knows remains eminently captivating, a feast for anyone who takes pleasure in seeing the past — be it locations or buildings or style — that time has stolen, that has made way for the new. (A new that itself will also one day make way for something else — the newer.)

Naturally, whatever documentary purposes the film maintains to have pretty much fly out the window during the inane comic sequence involving the egg-breaking factory, which is no way documentary in nature and totally ridiculous in the context of the film as a whole. (For some, the interlude might bring to mind the equally forced dramatic sequence of a staged suicide in the silent-film documentary, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City [1927 / full film], which likewise stands out as decidedly non-documentary interlude amidst the rest of the otherwise apparently non-fiction visuals. A feature film which, like this film here, presents an amazing view of a world that no longer exists.)

It is perhaps rather aside the point to argue whether The London Nobody Knows "works" as a documentary or not, for whatever flaws it might have, age has given the visual time capsule an amazing, eye-catching patina that makes it an absolutely absorbing watch.

Nevertheless, by the end of the 45 minutes, one cannot help but recognize a fact of life: while the locations may be long-gone or long-gentrified, the poverty and lifestyles of the film's underbelly are oddly recognizable as still present in every big city around the world today. 

In some ways, life never changes. Today, of course, there are new "forgotten" locations and structures that shall soon be no more, as property is money and money is god, but at the same time it seems, regardless of what is razed or gentrified, there will always be those who get left on the wayside, be it due to personal tragedy, alcoholism, stupidity, or simple bad luck. The only thing that has really changed is the clothing.

One Way (USA, 2022)

Is it good? Not really. Is it terrible? Naw, definitely not. Does it entertain? Yeah, well enough. Should you see it? Well, we have watched worse... like, for example, the totally different One Way from 2006 (trailer).

One Way offers an absorbing enough ride to be more entertaining than many a film, not to mention a real bus ride, but the narrative is too reliant on contrivances that require a substantial ability to ignore a concept known as "realistic". Thus, though the tale holds together well enough, one gets the feeling that the movie could be based on a previously unproduced, vintage TV-movie script — i.e., from the day and age when there was only the Big Three — that got pulled down off the shelf, dusted and updated, and then filmed as a second-feature cinema release (as if the filmmakers maybe forgot that double features no longer exist). Did this thing even hit the cinemas? (But then, who goes to cinemas anymore?)

Trailer to

One Way:

One Way opens with Freddy (Colson "Machine Gun Kelly" Baker of Viral [2016 / trailer], Bird Box [2018 / trailer] and Captive State [2019 / trailer]) fleeing at top speed down streets and alleyways as sirens wail in the background — the sirens might add to the "tension", but they are a ruse: in truth, Freddy just stole a bag of money and coke from a dealer, Vic (Drea de Matteo of Don't Sleep [2017 / trailer] and the already forgotten Assault on Precinct 13 remake [2005 / trailer]), and the cops have definitely not been called. 

 

He manages to make it aboard an oddly empty bus where, slowly bleeding to death from a bullet wound, he makes one desperate plan after another to solve his predicament, only to see them all fail. Additional narrative intrigue is added by his growing involvement with the young Rachel (Storm Reid, 19 years old playing 14, of The Nun II [2023 / trailer] and The Suicide Squad [2021 / trailer]), an underage runaway on her way meet her adult, cherry-picker, online "boyfriend" Smokie.

 

Okay, if you've watched the trailer, you can see that Kevin Bacon (of They/Them [2022 / trailer], Hollow Man [2000 / trailer], Wild Things [1998 / trailer], Tremors [1990], the Friday the 13th [1980 / trailer] without Jason, and so much more) figures in big as daddy Fred Sullivan Sr... but think again. His name is big, but his part is small, and he has in total about 10 minutes screen time. Not that he doesn't take advantage of those minutes: he plays an asshole, and an asshole he is, managing to imbue his Father-from-Hell with enough realistic trailer-park assholeism and scuzziness that he literally invigorates the screen by doing little more than to exude. One wonders why Freddy Jr, as desperate as he is, would ever bother calling him, a man he has listed in his cell phone as "Asshole", for leopards never change their spots. (But then again, desperate is desperate.)

It quickly becomes obvious that Freddy's bus ride is probably one way in more ways than one, and as such, it proves to be his time in purgatory — his period in which to realize mistakes, fix past ones and prevent future one — and achieve some sort of redemption. A concept all the more supported by the noirish cum nightmarish lighting of the bus and Freddy's worsening hallucinatory perception induced and augmented by his continual loss of blood; his hallucinations also include a suavely greasy mirror id that pops up now and then to either belittle or advise him. By the end of movie, however, Freddy's purgatorial journey on the bus offers him more than one chance of redemption, and his takes them all.

Much of the narrative relies on contrivances of the kind that pretty much only exist in movies. But seeing that much of what happens in most movies seldom or never happens in real life, who's to complain? (We will.)

 

Despite the entirely realistic concept of a young runaway naively going to meet her molester-to-be, for example, most of the Rachel/Freddy/Smokie storyline doesn't really ring true, especially in regard to how Rachel and Freddy end up ever-so-slowly bonding and definitely so as of the point that the supposed social services worker Will (Travis Fimmel of Needle [2010 / trailer], Warcraft [2016 / trailer], and Dreamland [2019 / trailer]) enters the picture.

Likewise, the relational triad between Freddy, his dad and the hard-as-nails crime boss Vic screams "narratively convenient" and "film trope" louder than it does in any way whisper "believable". As does, actually, the bit concerning Freddy's ex-wife and single-mom Christine (Meagan Holder of The Sand [2015 / trailer] and Dark Power [2013 / trailer]), which screams "TV movie" in that she is, in the end, so willing to put everything on the line for a man who hasn't really ever done jack-shit for her or their child. (Also, we couldn't help but wonder why the ever-so-ruthless Vic, who surely knew about Christine and daughter Lily [Casie Baker], never went after them as hostages to pressure Freddy to come back with the drugs and money, instead of just going after his cohort buddies Mac [Olaniyan Thurmon] and JJ [Luis Da Silva Jr].)

Whatever. In the end, One Way is one of those films which have way too many flaws to warrant being even half as good of a viewing experience as it is. Don't think too much — which isn't hard to do, as we all know, especially if you're a Republican — and you'll find it an engrossing, suspenseful ride, not to mention a well-shot one. In that sense, One Way is hardly a waste of time and an easy evening's viewing.