The One
In between his Hong Kong era, and his French era, Jet Li had his
American era, also known as ‘The Crappy Era’.
For those of you who like sports, it’s kinda like when Michael Jordan
played baseball. It’s still a sport, he’s
still an athlete, you’re still watching a legend, but there’s kinda more to it
than that.
Like a lot of
sci-fi action features of the last two decades, The One asks the questions:
Where was Paul Verhoeven when they were
making this?
and
Why couldn’t they get the money
together to pay him to direct this?
That guy just has a certain magic that could always elevate these
types of familiar genre romps into something more memorable. He could deliver the glorified violence that
these types of movies are designed to deliver, but in a way where he also was
commenting on it and maybe making you question yourself as a member of society
for rooting for such a thing. He could
build memorably bizarre character moments that stood out, but still fit within
building a fairly formula story. He also
knew how to slather on the tits. Those
are always nice.
In this film, Jet Li plays a rogue cop who decides he’s going to
journey across various alternate world dimensions killing the other variants of
himself, and gaining their power through The Quickening, and in the end, There
Can Be Only One, and he will have the power of a God. Becoming God isn’t the type of thing you can
really just do in your spare time like having a bar band or taking a
woodworking course. You can’t just sneak
off on this type of mission and so he’s attracted a fair bit of attention as an
inter-dimensional outlaw. He gets away
with killing several hundred of himself and actually makes it to the last one
when the inter-dimensional cops finally figure out the idea of a stakeout on
the final innocent Jet Li.
I’ll give this movie a fair bit of credit when it comes to their
depiction of the final Jet Li who will have to fight for his life against the
would-be God Jet Li. This character
actually represents a massive step forward for how Asians get treated in
Hollywood movies. He’s actually a
regular guy with a normal job, and get this, not only a wife, but a white
one. I know what you’re thinking,
Hollywood movies never depict Asian men as anything but asexual kung-fu monks,
but here he is, married to Carla Gugino.
But you conservative types don’t have to worry, they won’t have to
re-edit this film for the South. You can
watch the film frame by frame and you will see that there is not one shot of
them kissing. You don’t see them kiss,
but they’re married, and so at least it’s implicit that they fuck. And you don’t actually see Jet Li hanging out
with white buddies and having a beer, but it is suggested in the film that this
happens. It’s kinda sad that this is
groundbreaking, but I’m proud of Hollywood for making an effort. Like Jody Foster’s alien hologram father
tells us at the end of Contact, it’s
all about “baby steps”.
Good Jet Li bumps into this guy played by Jason Statham. Normally Statham appears in films bald,
shirtless, oiled-up, and speaking with a gravelly macho voice; all of which
usually helps put me in the right frame of mind to make love to my lady, but
alas, this was not her lucky night.
Statham appears as a man with a shirt and hair doing some silly attempt
at an American accent and is stuck playing the role of Special Agent
Exposition. It is implied that Statham
is avenging his brother, who was the expository text crawl at the beginning of
the film and presumably killed by Evil Jet Li.
Good Jet Li is enlightened by Special Agent Eposition and heads
off to fight Evil Jet Li. We are treated
to several entertaining scenes of the two Jets growing powers including the
film’s highlight when Evil Jet Li wields two motorcycles and uses them to crush
a cop. We might expect that the final
battle between these two would be like that crazy epic fight between Neo and
Smith in The Matrix 3: Revolutions. Obviously this film doesn’t have that kind of
budget (or vision), but what we get is actually pretty good. All of the action in this movie is actually
pretty good. It’s mostly that CGI and
wirework-heavy variety of action which makes it almost a waste of somebody with
Jet Li’s amazing physical abilities seeing as Paul Dano could be
motion-captured and puppetted through these scenes just as well, but it’s still
fun to watch.
Jet Li is more charismatic than a lot of martial arts actors out
there. He’s got good screen presence,
but he’s more suited to darker more intense quiet characters and so he’s more
fun to watch as the Evil Jet Li; and even though it’s socially progressive,
he’s not entirely believable as the yuppie sheriff with the hot wife who is
always down for pints with the boys at the sports bar. Which brings us to this film and its two conclusions. We get the first ending, which I got a good
kick out of, because normally this type of ending is reserved for Nicolas Cage
movies like Face/Off when Travolta
brings home the replacement son for his own dead son like a new puppy, or the
end of Con Air where Cage’s family
magically appears in the flaming wreckage of Las Vegas (even though nothing in
the story was taking place in Vegas up to this point) so that they can all have
a group hug amongst gas fumes and Danny Trejo’s corpse. We get Good Jet getting popped into another
dimension where he lands right next to an injured dog which he carries into the
animal hospital and jumps right to the head of line and re-meets his Carla
Gugino, who is alive in this dimension and one of those low-neckline-wearing
veterinarians. It touched my inner
cheesiness when Carla Gugino gives Jet Li the mostly obviously
contractually-obligated look of love since From
Justin to Kelly. They should’ve
tried that shot with a sandwich off screen and maybe that would’ve motivated
more a more convincing warmth from her.
I had a good laugh at this cheeseball moment, but then we also get a
second ending showing Evil Jet landing in the prison dimension revealing this
film to be a prequel to Ricki-Oh: The
Story of Ricky. And I got even
happier.
This film is not DTV, so it doesn’t get judged on that
standard. It’s more on the low end of
theatrical releases. You know, the movie
that you go to see opening weekend and it’s already in the small cinema at the
multiplex and the only other people there are 14 year old boys? Yeah, that’s right, the PWS Anderson standard
of cinema. It’s not as dull as Resident Evil, it’s not impressively
retarded like Resident Evil 2: The
Apocalypse, I will put The One
on par with Resident Evil 3: Extinction
as functionally entertaining. But now
that I’ve seen it a second time, I remember why I forgot about seeing it the
first time.
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