- Directed by James Wong
- Written by Glen Morgan and James Wong
- Starring
- Jet Li
- Carla Gugino
- Delroy Lindo
- Jason Statham
- James Morrison
Hey, I’ll admit it. I had fun watching The One. The only distraction was that strange sensation behind my eyes. I had hogtied my brain for the duration, and it was struggling mightily to get out and take a stand.
As one of the movies that participated in the Matrixification of action movies (Matrixulation, maybe?), The One is actually different from The Matrix in many ways. Leather overcoats and sunglasses don’t show up, nobody pops brightly-colored pills, no one eats porridge from a tin can, and the star does have to tell us that he knows kung fu. We can tell that on our own.
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“I think the red jammies qualify as ‘cruel and unusual,’ don’t you, guys?” |
Said star, of course, in Jet Li, and I just want to digress and thank Mr. Li for not choosing a goofy Anglo showbiz name for himself. Sure, sometimes they work out well — “Jackie Chan” has just the right flavor of classy goofiness, for instance — but it would be really hard to take seriously any slam-bang Hollywood action movie starring “Sidney Li” or “Beauregard Li” or “Alphonse Li.” (And I’m doubly thankful he didn’t take the obvious path and call himself “Bruce.”)
Li stars as roughly 123 people in this movie, though thankfully we only see a handful of them in action; the rest only appear in photos, wearing a variety of bad wigs. When we first see him, he’s playing Lawless, a hated criminal being transported from prison by a heavily-armed police contingent. Between the pseudo-futuristic police gear and the TV showing a clip of “President Gore” addressing Congress (plus the fact that you already know what the movie’s about), it’s pretty clear we’re in an alternate universe. (Although later, when we’re supposedly on home turf, a TV shows President Bush introducing his universal healthcare policy. Hey, my suspension of disbelief can only handle so much!)
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Boy, THAT’S convenient. |
Lawless isn’t long for this w– er, his world, because he’s the target of one mean customer: Yulaw, also Jet Li. Lawless may be a punk, but Yulaw’s got him beat: He’s from yet another parallel universe, there to ice his own counterpart because he found out, while policing the multiverse, that if he kills the parallel versions of himself, he gets stronger and faster and smarter. (He does not, however, approach greater enlightenment and attunement with the universe to go with that.)
All of which is, let’s be frank, an excuse for a lot of energetic action scenes. No sooner does Yulaw show up than the bullet-timing and wire-fuing start in at full tilt. He jumps to the tops of buses! He dodges automatic weapons’ fire! He runs at fifty miles an hour! He slices! He dices! He purees! And yes, he gets Lawless, leaving only one other parallel version of himself. The only problem?
Well, duh. That guy’s Jet Li, too.
Briefly captured, Yulaw escapes from the multiverse justice system and makes it to our world, or at least as close a facsimile thereof as Hollywood usually manages to craft. The iteration here is Gabe Law, who’s more of a parallel to Yulaw than most of the other doubles referenced. Yulaw was a Multiverse Agent before he saw the benefits of killing your selves for fun and profit; Gabe is a sheriff’s deputy. Yulaw’s girlfriend, who helped him escape, is played by Carla Gugino; Gabe is married to a spunky veterinarian, T.K., also played by Gugino. Oh, and Gabe’s also garnering superhuman powers, though he has no idea why; apparently, when mirror universe versions of them die, the remaining “life energy”/ki/Energizer juice is split up between those remaining. So Yulaw, drunk with power, wants to kill the last remaining Immortal and claim the Prize. Whoops, sorry. He wants to kill the last remaining parallel iteration and be the remaining One.
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“You know how much one of these Logan’s Run guns’ll set ya back on eBay?” |
Now, let’s review that. There’s a version of every individual in every parallel universe, and when one kicks the bucket, the rest all get a little more powerful. Yeah, I know. You see the problem. Heck, everyone sees the problem. If that were true, then Yulaw wouldn’t have gotten very far without having his ass handed to him by some kung fu octogenarian. Just think: every time one version of Great-Uncle Albert falls and can’t get up, one of the others throws away his walker and starts doing one-handed pushups. To make matters worse, this unresolved paradox is explicitly referenced: T.K., discussing Gabe’s new abilities, points out that “people get older, Gabe, they don’t get stronger. They don’t get faster all of a sudden.”
I mean, come on — it’s bad enough that there’s a huge logical flaw right smack-dab in the middle of the high concept driving the plot. But it’s simply insulting to the audience when they point at it and thumb their noses at the audience who paid for the privilege. The only attempt they even make to spackle over the problem is, well, having Jet Li(s) kick some ass.
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“I dunno. Do YOU think my barrel is clean?” |
To be fair, the double Jet Li fights are almost flawless, thanks to the march of technology. Alas, some of the creative choices in the superpowered bouts were just a bit too over-Matrixed. Remember, in The Matrix, they could do some of those snazzy moves because they were altering the laws of “reality.” There’s no indication that whittling down the Jet Lis gives the remaining ones power over space and time, so it makes no sense that there are so many gravity-defying moves going on here.
What? I’m not talking enough about the actual story? Shucks, you don’t need me to tell you about it. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, you could still guess well enough at the obvious plot points to fake it. Yulaw chases Gabe, they have some spectacular fights, there’s a whole bunch of mistaken identity (exacerbated by the fact that they both end up wearing black coveralls and gray T-shirts), T.K. gets in the middle of it, and there’s a final, spectacular bout-to-end-all-bouts. And give yourself extra points if you guessed that said ultimate battle takes place in a strangely deserted industrial factory, with tons of pipes’n'catwalks’n’shit.
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Naturally, one of the parallel universe doubles was a glam rock star. |
And here’s the final area in which The One differs from The Matrix: despite having a premise that lends itself well to pop-philosophy, nobody even touches it. Mind you, it’s not that I think we need more Matrix-style fortune-cookie wisdom in the world, masquerading as actual wisdom. But here’s a premise that practically begs to deal with issues of what makes us who we are — if Yulaw and Gabe share so much, how is it that Yulaw’s a cold-blooded killer while Gabe saves injured puppies? — and yet absolutely nothing is done with it. Even that hoary old cliche of showdowns, the villain who tells the hero, “We are much alike, you and I,” would have been something. (Oddly enough, I remember the writers saying that the project had originally been developed for The Rock, but when they got Jet Li instead, they did a rewrite to play down relationships and dialogue in favor of more fu-fighting.)
Oh, well. It’s a short movie (and feels even shorter thanks to the determined lack of depth), and it does have plenty of energy and visual pizzazz. As long as your brain won’t be permanently offended by being told to sit down and shut up for the duration, it can be considered good entertainment.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 21
- breasts: 0
- explosions:9
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- spring-loaded cats: 1
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
- Steve Rankin (The Multiverse cop supervisor) played “Patahk” in the TNG episode “The Enemy,” “Cardassian Tactical Officer” in the DS9 pilot “The Emissary,” and “Yeto” in the DS9 episode “Invasion Procedures”
- Tucker Smallwood (the prison warden) played “Admiral Bullock” in the Voyager episode “In the Flesh” and “Xindi-Humanoid” in two episodes of Enterprise
- Denney Pierce (the ER security guard) did stunts on DS9 and in Generations
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