Pun Salad

I watched the original movie version back in 1981, and I liked it well enough to check out the associated novel. They were fine, but I would not have expected to see a remake of the movie in 2025. Yet, here we are.

The plot is pretty simple: Rami Malek plays Charlie, a CIA geek working in the bowels of Langley on computer security and cryptography issues. He's happily married to Sarah. Whose job takes her over to London, where she is murdered in a terrorist attack.

The CIA rapidly identifies the perpetrators, but is unwilling to bring them to justice, either legal or vigilante-style. So Charlie takes on the task himself, with woefully inferior qualifications for wet work in the field. Still…

It's nice to see Remi Malek play a (more or less) normal human protagonist. The plot is imaginative, and I stayed awake. On that score, it really helped that I remembered nearly nothing about the version I saw 44 years ago.

One possible gripe is the ending, which failed somewhat to satisfy my thirst for revenge on Charlie's behalf. There's also a climactic surprise plot twist, which, seen in sober retrospect, seems pretty contrived.