The One

For those of you who have ever seen a martial arts film, you will know that their plots are often fairly straightforward. One guy knows martial arts, the other guy knows martial arts, one is good, one is evil, they fight repeatedly and the good guy eventually comes out on top. Simple yet effective. Well if there is one martial arts film that can combine good old fashioned hand to hand combat with a needlessly contrived and wildly over explained plot, it's The One.

Released in 2001 under the direction of James Wong (Final Destination) and starring Jet Li, Jason Statham, Delroy Lindo and Carla Guingo, The One depicts a reality in which there is not a single Universe, but many, a 'Multiverse'. That means that every person in the world has a counterpart in every universe. If one of the counterparts die, their energy is distributed between the others. So the more counterparts that die, the stronger the remainders become. In the middle of all this is a an L.A. cop called Gabe Law, who has noticed that his strength, both physical and mental, has been increasing over the past few years. If that synopsis makes no sense to you, then you are not alone. So lets try and dissect this cinematic enigma.

The movie begins with a prisoner called Lawless (Li) being transported to another prison. But before the transfer can occur, Lawless is killed by YuLaw (Li again), who has been travelling around the other parallel universes, killing his counterparts so he can become 'The One', a being of supreme power. With Lawless dead, only 1 counterpart remain, Law (Li yet again). Yu Law tracks him down and tries to kill him, but Gabe is always aware of his presence, and so his plans are repeatedly foiled.

Hot on the tail of YuLaw are 2 men: Rodecker & Funsch (Lindo & Statham respectively). They are Multiverse Agents, members of an organisation which polices the travel between universes, and YuLaw has been breaching their regulations. Gabe continues to attempt to avoid YuLaw with the help of the agents, who try and tell Gabe what has been happening to him and why, but he is reluctant to believe them.

Judo Kick!

So, did you understand any of that? I didn't think so. The plot is by far the films biggest letdown. It's so nonsensical to the point where you think it might just as well have been an afterthought. The film falls into the trap that the Matrix films did. The more it tried to explain, the more confusing it became. Answering 1 query just resulted in a bunch more springing up. The whole Multiverse issue is pretty interesting but it still raises questions. If every person has an identical counterpart, does that mean every time someone is born in one universe, they are born in all the other universes simultaneously. Does that mean the people in all the universe are also procreating at the same time too? What if a woman has a miscarriage, do all the unborn counterparts die as well? It's just not a solid enough idea. It's like films about time travel, they always have some pretty glaring holes in them.

With that said, the rest of the film is actually not bad. The characters are fun, the shoot-em-up scenes, while being a bit of a Matrix rip-off, are cool to watch, the fight scenes are great thanks to Li's skills, and if your willing to suspend your reasoning and logical mechanisms, then you'll have a good time watching it too. Just switch off your brain and let the bullets, kicks and punches fly.