John Wick

Don’t worry, he’s got this.

 The Adaptive Curmudgeon explains John Wick:

SPOILER ALERT!
(Note: I’m not sure it matters which John Wick movie you see. They’re all the same John Wick movie. I say that even though I haven’t even seen the one in theaters right now. “John Wick Episode III: the Wickening”.) The plot of John Wick is all about pre-paid emergency contingency services. There’s a lot of splattery killing but that’s true of most Hollywood crap, it’s the contingency planning that makes Wick special.
To summarize: Neo from the Matrix gets righteously pissed when low end thuggish criminals act unforgivably low end. They go full thug on his pet. Never go full thug! Never mess with a man’s dog! That’s a key plot point in Wick. Thugs ignore the limits of acceptable behavior and that’s not OK. Once they’ve taken a shit on society, the rest of us cheer for a violent nutjob who kills them in box lots. We see ‘em get stabbed, bludgeoned, kneecapped, shot, burned, blown up, bent, folded, and spindled… and it’s fun to watch. Kids, here’s some helpful Curmudgeonly advice, don’t go into a career of thuggery! (Also, you might want to avoid politics, but that’s another story.)

He goes on for a bit, and it's very funny. Made my day. Read the whole thing.

John Wick

John Wick: Chapter 4

Variety has an entertaining review of the latest John Wick movie:

John Wick: Chapter 4 Review: Keanu Reeves in a Three-Hour Action Epic That’s Like a Spaghetti Western Meets John Woo as Seen in Times Square

I liked the first John Wick film, the second one not so much, I think we tried to watch another one, but there didn't seem to be any story, so we bailed. I'm not going to watch any more of them. Action movies are fine, but there needs to be a story. Action alone is not enough for me.

The Continental Safe

John Wick

You remember John Wick, right? I mean, how could you forget?

The Continental hotel manager Charon (Lance Reddick) and John Wick (Keanu Reeves) in the armory

The latest chapter has him and Chaon, the hotel manager, visiting The Continental hotel's armory to pick up a couple of guns. Of course the hotel has an armory. Don't all hotels have armories?

The $100,000 Continental Safe From John Wick

Now you can have your own armory, styled after the Continental's, complete with a bunch of guns.


Guns & Knives included with The Continental Safe
Via say uncle

John Wick: Chapter 2

John Wick: Chapter 2 Official Trailer #1 (2017) Keanu Reeves Action Movie HD
Zero Media
We saw the original John Wick several years ago and it was pretty great. I was reading a post about the John Wick movies yesterday and learned that there are four (four!) of them. Well, if the first one was so great, and we've got the same star, it ought to be pretty good, right? Wrong. There were some good scenes, scenes that kind of told a story, but in between these scenes were these endless gun battles. Keeno must have kilt a zillion bad guys. What I want to know is where do the criminal kingpins get this seemingly inexhaustible supply of henchmen, killers who are willing get in a gunfight where your opponent might be (rumors fly, things happen so fast, you may not know who you are going confront) the most proficient killer the world has ever seen. Anyway, it was a lot like Shoot 'Em Up with Clive Owen. That one was at least funny.

P. S. This one was available on Peacock streaming service. Give them your email address, clickety clickety click through a dozen or so screens of nonsense, watch maybe five minutes of ads, and poof, Bob's your uncle.

Ballerina

Ballerina | Official Trailer | Netflix [ENG SUB]

Diminutive, Korean, female John Wick takes on the thug army and slaughters them. Just like John Wick, although this one seems to have a bit more story to it.

When I dialed up Ballerina on YouTube, what else should show up?

BALLERINA: A John Wick Story – Trailer (2024) Keanu Reeves, Ana de Armas...

Nothing like watching the good guys destroying bad guys in box lots.

This and That

WICKED

I'm working the Sunday Jumble and one of the words, after it's been unscrambled, is WICKED. Now WICKED is a perfectly cromulant word. You might notice that the first four letters of WICKED is WICK. WICKED looks like a past tense of the verb WICK, but I don't think WICK is a verb unless you are referring to someone's violent actions, like 'he went all John WICK on the bad guys'. But WICK, as far as I know, is a noun, not a verb, so you can't have a world like WICKED unless you are making it out of some other kind of WICK. Maybe we should look up WICKED and see what we find:

wicked - evil or morally wrong.

Origin Middle English: probably from Old English wicca ‘witch’ + -ed1.

But there's something funny about tacking ED onto the end of WICK. If you tack ED onto the end of some verb like CALL you get CALLED, but you do not pronounce the ED like you do in WICKED, It's more like CALL'D, whereas with WICKED you get a distinctive ED sound at the end. Or maybe that's just me.

I looked around for some code to embed some audio clips, but I got nowhere. Probably wasn't holding my mouth right.

SUBTITLES

We're watching the Portland Trail Blazers basketball game this evening and I notice that the subtitles have gotten turned on. They don't seem to bother my wife and she's the devoted fan, but they bug me. They cover the top, I dunno, 20% maybe, of the screen and they don't really interfere with watching the game, being as they are usually giving us long shots so we can see the whole of the action. The court occupies the middle half of the screen, so the top and bottom quarters of the screen are just noise, you can fill them with whatever you want and it won't interfere with the game. Vital information goes in the bottom quarter and the top quarter is just the audience, so the subtitles can go up there. But they bug me, so I turned them off.

After the game we switched to True Detective on HOMAX or whatever it's called, and now I gotta turn the subtitles back on again.

So what's the diff? When we're watching the game, the announcer fills the sound track and it's like a pleasant hum of background noise. Nothing he says is of any import, but we've been listening to him for years and whenever the Blazers play in some foreign city we sometimes get foreign announcers, and those guys just grate on me.

When we are watching shows off the internet, be it Netflix, Prime or HOBOAX, we like to listen to the dialog, but sometimes we can't quite hear what they're saying, either because they talk so quietly, or background noise, or an accent, or, what's probably the worst, is when they make a quick out-of-character quip and you have nothing to grasp onto that will help your mind make sense of what they said. So we turn on the subtitles,

Yesterday I said that I don't listen to people unless they are right in front of me. That's not exactly true, I listen to TV dramatic shows, and I watch YouTube videos. I think the difference might be that they are like basketball games, I'm watching the action and the audio track is just warm background noise. I suspect that I keep going back to the same ones because I like the sound of their voice, or at least not repelled, which some voices do.

 

47 Ronin Official Trailer #1 (2013) - Keanu Reeves, Rinko Kikuchi Movie HD

If you want a short description, you might call it John Wick goes to Japan. It's a retelling of an old story with some Hollywood embellishments. Keano plays the half-breed child of white man and a Japanese peasant woman, as such he is an outcast. He is discovered at around age 15 lying in a creek by a local warlord who takes him in. So now he lives in a hut on the outskirts of the village. The warlord's daughter is attracted to him, possibly because he is a curiosity, but also because there aren't a lot of other people their age here. Anyway, they are the love story, but because of the strict rules of their society, their relationship is entirely chaste. I think she kisses him once towards the end.

When the bad man takes over the local warlord fiefdom, he sells Keano into slavery on the Dutch Island. The Dutch Island is a collection of dozens of big, fat sailing vessels, all moored cheek by jowl. We only see them at night when they are all lit up, probably using lamps that burned grease, and they burned it by the hogshead.

A year goes by, the daughter's period of mourning for her father is over and the bad guy intends to wed her. The 47 Ronin decide now is the time to get their revenge on the bad guy, so their head man heads to Dutch Island to get Keano. Keano has become a gladiator of sorts and is is the middle of dealing with a giant, ugly dude. He does and then he and the head Ronin fight their way free of a mess of Europeans.

The bad guy is aided by a witchy woman who transforms herself into a giant flowing scarf to get inside of places.

Reunited, our crew attempts to ambush the bad guy but the witchy woman foils their plans. They escape but they lose most of their weapons. So now Keano has to go visit the people he grew up with in the Tengo forest. Keano's mother abandoned him in the Tengo forest when he was a baby. These weird monk-like people raised him and taught him their secrets. Something about their teachings cut across his grain, which is what caused him to run away. But these guys have skills, and weapons. So Keano goes crawling back. Naturally, there are some tests that he must pass in order to receive their help, so we have a big fight scene where all Keano's buddies get killed. Turns out it was all an illusion and since they passed the test, they get the swords they need.

Now they sneak into the bad guy's castle. It doesn't take long before they are discovered and all hell breaks loose. Keano unleashes patented John Wick persona and mows the bad guys down in box lots. Eventually we get to the final showdown between the witchy woman and Keano. The witchy woman transforms herself  into a giant snake like dragon of the Asian style when she gets into a fight with Keano. Keano has his hands full fighting the dragon while also protecting his girlfriend who cowers helplessly in the corner, as good damsel-in-distress ought to. Eventually Keano prevails.

So they rescued the girl and got their revenge on the bad guy and now they get their reward, which is to die an honorably death as opposed to being executed as common criminals. And so they all commit suicide. The end.

P. S. The Shogun, who was the top dog, above the bad guy, looked completely wrong for the part. He just wasn't convincing. Too ugly, maybe?

P. P. S. The Dutch Island seems to have been a real place:

II THE JAPANESE-DUTCH RELATIONSHIP

The Portuguese had first arrived in Japan in 1543, so contacts between Japan and the Netherlands were not the oldest and longest Japan had enjoyed with a western country. Contacts with Asian countries such as Korea, China and Taiwan naturally went back to much earlier times. However, during the `sakoku-jidai`, the so-called seclusion period, Holland and China were the only countries permitted to trade and have limited contacts with Japan. It was a status which actually lasted over two centuries, from 1641 to 1853, and as the only western country with such privileges, Holland held a very special position. It was the door through which knowledge on science and medicine, and products and armaments from the Netherlands and Europe were imported into Japan through the Dutch settlement on Deshima, the man-made fan-shaped island in the Bay of Nagasaki. Simultaneously the Dutch generated great wealth exporting Japanese products and knowledge to the west. For both sides, Deshima was more than just a window on a new world.

Mercy For None - Netflix Series

Mercy For None | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Korean John Wick wades through an army of thugs using his fists, knives, broken glass, actually anything that comes to hand. You know the shits about to go down when he puts on his gloves. Sometimes he'll pick up a knife in the middle of one of his killing sprees and we get even more blood splashed on the screen. For the main event, he has a special bat made. It's a metal bat and looks like there is a five pound weight wrapped around the big end. It makes a great sound when he drags it across the concrete floor.

Unlike John Wick, it's not about his dog, it's about his brother. The useless son of an allied chief gangster ordered the hit. Half way through the show, our guy gets his revenge. Think this might trigger an even bigger bloodbath? Well, we've still got three episodes to go. Somehow I don't think they're going to sitting around drinking tea and crumpets and discussing their philosophy of revenge.

The Watching the Detectives label is there to let you know this show is about criminals. However, we've only seen one cop so far, and he wasn't doing much detecting. He was being interrogated by a mob boss.

John Wick

A very silly, vary action-y movie starring Keeno Reeves in the title role. Yes, I know that's not how he spells his name, and yes, I know that's not how it's pronounced, but I can never remember the correct pronunciation, and besides, I kinda like saying 'keen-o'.
    The best part was spotting all the character actors we had seen in other shows, like . . .

Lance Reddick as The Continental hotel manager Charon, from The Wire.

Clarke Peters as Harry, also from The Wire. He only shows up briefly, most memorably in the hotel corridor in his underwear carrying a gun, you know, just in case.

Michael Nyqvist (right) as Viggo Tarasov and Alfie Allen as his son Iosef Tarasov. Michael Nyqvist we saw in the Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. We've been watching Alfie Allen playing the horribly tortured victim Reek on Game of Thrones.

Here we have Adrianne Palicki as the assassin Perkins. I don't actually remember seeing her before, but she has a memorable fight seen with Keeno in this movie. Plus she carries a gun, though she doesn't manage to hit anything with it. Bad quality in an assassin. Her expression here more than makes up for not holding a gun at the moment.

I don't know where they got the story for this movie, but I suspect a graphic novel. Or maybe they skipped that step. Our hero drives a succession of high performance cars. He starts with an old high-performance Mustang, similar to Eleanor from the remake of Gone in 60 Seconds. When that gets stolen he gets an early 1970's Chevelle Super Sport. I think that one gets trashed, so now he gets a new Dodge Charger. I think the Chrysler product placement team is working overtime these days. Chrysler products seem to be the choice of bad guys across the board in movieland.
    I understand how some people are still mentally locked into those aging muscle cars, but for me they are more like dinosaurs. Big, heavy, cumbersome and crude, that can be beaten six ways from Sunday by any number of modern cars. Probably not by a Civic, but certainly by a some versions of a Cadillac.

Song of the Bandits

Song of the Bandits | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix K-Content

It looks like a Western, but it's set in Korea, so does that make it an Eastern? The show has a bit of comic-book flavor, but that's okay, we don't really want to look too closely at what's going on here. In reality it's pretty awful, so we'll pull back a bit and let our focus be a bit fuzzy. We're in early 20th century Korea and we've got people wearing Western clothes, riding horses and carrying great big six guns. The landscape looks like the American west - wide open plains with mountains off in the distance. I suppose there could be places like that in Korea, but I haven't found any. Kind of reminds me of Clint Eastwood's old Spaghetti Westerns.

Japan invaded Korea in 1910 and occupied it until the end of WW2. The Joseon Empire that ruled the country collapsed at the end of the 19th century. Now we have Japanese soldiers roaming around the country shooting anyone they choose, and we have gangs of bandits roaming around the country shooting anyone they choose, and we have the resistance army roaming around the country shooting anyone they choose, and then we've got the peasants, who mostly just get shot. Very violent.

The story has more bad situations than any show I have seen since I don't know when. The story revolves around a half dozen Koreans. Two guys, a master and his slave, joined the Japanese army. The story starts with the slave heading north to make amends for previous misdeeds. He feels his just punishment would be his death, and he is fine with that. The man who he has wronged (by killing his family) no longer wants revenge, he is simply trying to preserve the lives of local villagers. The master is fully in thrall with the Japanese, even though he is still second class, his being Korean and all. He is disappointed in his slave, who had become his friend, but now that he has gone north, he is just one more rebel to be destroyed.

Then there is the black market arms dealer. A mature woman, dressing in the latest Western fashions, operating out of a brick, four story hotel in what looks like Topeka, Kansas in 1880. She keeps her inventory well stocked by sending her minions out to scavenge arms from the dead whenever there is a battle.

Another woman is a hitman, killing people for a price. She gets to display her talents in, I think, episode 2 where she goes all John Wick on an entire company of soldiers in a hotel.

Lastly we have a femme fatale, a real Mati Hari, who is in love with the slave, but pretends to be in love with the master to the point of marrying him, in order to get military information that can help the rebels. She has also wormed her way into the railway company's administration, so she is privy to all kinds of top secret info.

Korea Railroad Map
From a screenshot taken just after the eleven minute mark of episode one

The Japanese want to extend their rail line farther north. They want to use it to transport troops north to fight the rebels. To this end they ship 200,000 won (worth about $10 million in today's money) north via an armored car. Rumor gets out about this shipment and the colonel in charge wants to cancel the operation, but his subordinate (the master) wants to let it go ahead because it is sure to attract the bandits and when they attack he will be there to crush them.

Our girl assassin gets wind of this shipment and manages to locate the manager of the bank that will be shipping the money. She pays him a visit and tells him that the bandits are going to rob the armored car and since they will undoubtedly be successful, they should fill the strongbox with dirt and keep the money. The bandits will get blamed and the manager and the assassin will get off scott free. Clever, if all goes according to plan, but something tells me that's not going to happen.

Until I saw this show I had no idea what happened in Korea prior to the Korean war. My history education kind of missed that. As far as I knew, prior to the Korean War, Korea didn't exist. That they have managed to come so far since then is flat-out amazing.

One of the things that bugs me about Korean shows are the times someone laughs at something that is not funny. I don't know whether this is a common screen writer's trick to ensure that the audience knows that this character is an idiot, or whether it reflects actual behaviors. Pretty weird in any case.

Extraction

Extraction | Official Trailer | Screenplay by JOE RUSSO Directed by SAM HARGRAVE | Netflix
Big, tough white man (Chris Helmsworth) goes to war against an army of drug war minions and goes all John Wick on them. Great stuff.

It starts with an Indian drug lord's son being kidnapped by the minions of a rival drug lord from Bangladesh. Drug Lord #1 is in jail, so he directs his lieutenant to get his son back. The lieutenant hires our hero, a mercenary from Australia for the job. There's just one problem, the lieutenant doesn't have any money on account of the drug lord's bank accounts have been frozen.

Drug lord #2 is holding the kid in Dhaka, which is evidently an island, because the only way out of the city is on one of the bridges, and his minions have set up roadblocks on the all the bridges looking for our hero.

P. S. I wrote this back in 2020, but I didn't finish it or post it. But now I need it for another post, so here we are.

Lucy

Lucy - Trailer (Official - HD)
Universal Pictures

The whole movie is available on YouTube.

Woke up at 3AM this morning. Great. What am I gonna do? Turn on YouTube and this movie shows up. Well, I'm a zombie, may as well give it a try. Funny, I was able to watch the whole thing. It's rare that I can watch a TV show or movie by myself. Most all the shows I watch, I watch with my wife. Odd, I suppose, but that's the way my brain works. Anyway the show is a little nuts, it's a mix of John Wick, psychedelic nightmare and basic evolutionary biology. From Luc Besson who gave us The 5th Element and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Great stuff.

P. S. Lucy is an American living in Taipei, Taiwan, who gets dragooned into being a drug mule who is accidentally dosed with a drug that activates a myriad of pre-encoded genetic conscious capabilities.

90 minutes

Cast:

Actor	Surname	Title	Actor	Surname	Role
Scarlett	Johansson		Lucy	Miller	our girl
Morgan	Freeman	Professor	Samuel	Norman	the voice of reason
Choi	Min-sik	Mr.		Jang	South Korean drug lord
Amr	Waked		Pierre	Del Rio	French police officer
Julian	Rhind-Tutt				polite British villain who sews drug packs into the mules
Pilou	Asbæk		Richard		Lucy's delinquent boyfriend in Taipei
Lio	Tipton		Caroline		Lucy's roommate in Taipei
Nicolas	Phongpheth		Jii		Jang's top henchman

The first four have the only persistent roles. The rest of them are memorable for their brief appearances.

Atomic Blonde

Atomic Blonde Red Band Trailer #1 (2017) Charlize Theron Action Movie HD
Charlize Theron does James Bond, or maybe John Wick. It's not a very good movie, it's stylish (I mean we do have Charlize) and it's action packed, but it's a little confused, or maybe that's just me.

The best part was the soundtrack. The film is set in November 1989 in Berlin while the wall is coming down. They pull all these lines out of these hit songs that make you wonder whether the songwriters knew what they were talking about, or maybe they were just channeling society's turmoil.

I found one playlist on YouTube that has most of the tunes from the soundtrack except for this one, which I have been listening to lately.


After The Fire - Der Kommissar

Kate

KATE | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

A very stylish, over the top, action thriller, reminiscent of Blade Runner and, now that you mention it, Atomic Blonde. The car chase scene and the car used in that scene were spectacular. Kate mows down a bunch of bad guys, but it wasn't quite as endless as John Wick: Chapter 2. There was a bit of a plot, but not enough to worry about. The nightlife scenes in Tokyo were pretty great, and the teenage girl was a hilarious bright spot.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars as Kate the assassin and Woody Harrelson as her boss Varrick. During her last mission, she finds out that she has been poisoned with Polonium 204. Golly gee, that sounds a whole lot like Crank (Jason Statham).

Netflix, 1:46

Netflix Rejects

We looked at several shows this evening before we found one we liked. These are the rejects:

• Strong Girl Nam-soon - Series - Litte girl in Mongolia throws 200 pound man across the arena.
• Warrior - Series - Reminds me of Kung Fu. Tall, white looking Chinese guy arrives in San Francisco in 1870 and falls in with a Chinese Tong (gangsters). Lots of people being belligerent, lots of fighting. Pretty good production values, but cardboard characters and not much substance to the story. Also everybody speaks English. The Chinese characters start with speaking Chinese so you know that's what they are speaking, but then they switch to English, possibly because most Netflix consumers don't like subtitles. I like to hear foreigners speaking furrin. I don't quite understand why that is. Makes it more authentic, maybe?
• Warrior Nun - Series - Some kind of grisly, mystical, sci-fi war story.
• The Shadow Strays - Movie - Female John Wick killing all the bad guys.

Gunpowder Milkshake

Gunpowder Milkshake | Karen Gillan & Lena Headey | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Way over the top shoot 'em up gangster movie. Best show I've seen in a long time. Take equal parts Pulp Fiction, John Wick and Clint Eastwood, stir liberally, add a pinch of Sin City and serve. Near continuous action, superb fight choreography and fabulous sets, but it's the little things, too many to count, that send it over the top into comedy.

A Killer Paradox - Netflix Series

A Killer Paradox | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix K-Content

Convenience store clerk gets into altercations with people. Pushed beyond his limit he retaliates and kills them only to find out that the people he killed were reprehensible killers themselves. Now he is stumbling through life with all these murders on his mind. Needless to say, he is a little confused. Local cop tasked with solving the multitude of murders that have suddenly started showing up on his beat kind of / sort of suspects our guy on account of him always being in the area. Cop also has a long term project of looking for the ex-cop who put his father in a coma. 

Turns out both our clerk and the ex-cop have connections to a computer nerd who researches suspected dirt-bags. When he confirms his findings, he directs his killers to their targets. Ex-cop goes off the rails and just starts killing random people. Perhaps because they are dirty dirt-bags, perhaps because they annoyed him, perhaps because they looked at him funny. Anyway, he kills the granddaughter of some corporate honcho and then the heat is on and things get very messy in a John Wick kind of way. Will our clerk and the nerd escape the manhunt? We'll find out tonight. Or maybe not, if there are plans for season two.

Wikipedia article about the show.

P. S. Couple of items. One is when a prisoner is being transported to jail. He is inadequately restrained and attacks the guards who are with him in the van and causes the van to crash. And because he is the evil villain, he is in the only one who manages to get out of the wreck on his own. This same thing happened in season 2 of Dark Winds. No wonder cops are often getting in trouble for the way they treat prisoners. Can't say as I blame them.

The other is something that seems to happen fairly often in TV shows. Some guy, full of himself, makes some kind of accusation against the hero, the hero is nonplussed, and then after a second or two, the guy laughs and says I'm just foolin' with you or some such. I find this kind of behavior juvenile and irritating. However, the guy is often right, so it's doubly disconcerting. Our hero was within a hair's breadth of getting found out by some moron. Bah, double bah and humbug.

Rurouni Kenshin: The Final

Kenshin Takes on Enemy Territory Alone ⚔️ | Rurouni Kenshin: The Final | Netflix
Netflix Philippines
A semi-silly conclusion to the series. Like I said before, it's basically John Wick 2 with swords. Endless supplies of bad guys who get knocked down and beat up in these massive sword fights where hardly anyone ever gets cut. Kind of weird. It's kind of like 'if we just put a bunch guys wailing on each other on the screen, it'll be an entertaining scene'. Anyway, there's a bunch of that, a handful of very nasty villains, a goodly bunch of over the top stunts, and, oh yeah, a couple of cute girls.

Netflix 2+ hours

Rurouni Kenshin: The Beginning

RUROUNI KENSHIN: THE BEGINNING – Official Main Trailer
ワーナー ブラザース 公式チャンネル

In the late 1860s Japan there was a civil war being fought between the Shogunate (the Samurai) and the Emperor.

This movie is a live action adaptation of the anime movie series, which is nominally based on the life of a real-life samurai from this time period.

It's basically John Wick 2 with a sword. Entertaining with good production values. There might be a story in there somewhere, and there is an attractive, enigmatic girl. 

The film is a prequel to the [four] other Rurouni Kenshin films . . . It focuses on Kenshin's past as the assassin Hitokiri Battōsai during the final years of the Bakumatsu  . . .  - Wikipedia

The Last Samurai (starring Tom Cruise) was set in the same era.

Furies

Furies | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix Phillippines

Comic book style criminal underground fantasy, in Paris. Very entertaining in a John Wick kind of way. A lot of it didn't make much sense, what with every player apparently double crossing every other player. Even when we get to the end we still aren't sure of who's on first. But we have a cute young woman bringing the smack down of box lots of thugs, so it's fun.

In the last episodes we have a secret underground train that runs continuously in the subway tunnels beneath Paris. I think I've seen the same thing in a couple of other movers. In the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, the head of the Japanese secret service, Tanaka, has a secret subway train. The Debt is one and it isn't really a secret train, there are just some secret bits.