Extras: Featurettes: Jet Li is "The One", Multiverses create "The One",
About Face & The Many Faces of Jet Li, Trailers, Filmographies, Animatic
Comparison, Audio Commentary
Director:
James Wong
(Final Destination, The One, TV: The X-Files)
Producers:
Steve Chasman, Glen Morgan, Charles Newirth and James Wong
Screenplay:
Glen Morgan and James Wong
Music:
Trevor Rabin
Cast:
Gabe Law/Gabriel Yulaw: Jet Li
T.K. Law/Massie Walsh: Carla Gugino
MVA Agent Harry Roedecker: Delroy Lindo
MVA Agent Evan Funsch: Jason Statham
LAPD Officer Bobby Aldrich: James Morrison
Yates: Dylan Bruno
D'Antoni: Richard Steinmetz
MVA Supervisor: Steve Rankin
The One
is Jet Li's chance to make a film featuring himself in dual roles, just
as Jackie Chan did with Twin Dragons, Jean Claude Van Damme did with
Double Impact and no doubt countless others before them. Do two Jet Lis
mean double the excitement, or just double the Van Damme hell? Sadly, it's
just about the latter.
Jet Li plays Gabriel Yulaw, the perfect killer with 123 murders so far.
He also takes on the roles of all the people he's killed since they're lookalikes
of himself - that's the way the parallel universes, or "multiverses", work in
this film and as he teleports once more he's confronted with himself in a
police uniform as Gabe Law, a good guy who slowly starts to behave like Yulaw
on a physical level as the film progresses.
The One plays like a cross between
The Matrix,
Terminator 2,
Six Million Dollar Man and the Highlander.
Yulaw dodges bullets and bends reality in mid-air, superhuman-strength is used to punch
holes in sheet metal, the baddie behaves just as strong as Lee Majors throughout
and there's a chant in the final fight of "There can be only one".
Carla Gugino is the token babe caught up in this mess, but she doesn't look
anywhere near half as hot as she used to. She also has a dual role, mainly as
Gabe's other half, T.K., and also in the original setting as a baddie, but you
either lose track or could care less about her position in the film since both
her characters are such non-events.
The other two leads are Multiverse Agents Roedecker
(Broken Arrow's
Delroy Lindo) and Funsch
(Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels'
Jason Statham), the former who always acts the determined character with
that same look across his face and by contrast there's a dire American accent
from Statham who sounds like he really can't be bothered in the vocal dept, or
anywhere else in his range this time.
The idea of making himself look the same as his targets has been done to death
many times and this is just a banal vehicle to push the name of Jet Li further
into the US Box Office consciousness. While I can sit through many an action
film, I find it rather on the dull side to see action that contains zero
originality or barely anything to capture my interest.
Jet Li shows what a motorbike can REALLY be used for.
Still, while the film sucks at least how it looks and sounds are without
question.
The picture is presented in an anamorphic 2.35:1 widescreen ratio with a
colourful and crystal clear look to it, no motion artifacts at all and bold
textures throughout.
The sound comes in Dolby Digital 5.1, is well used for all the action scenes
so there's nothing to worry about for fans of "crash, bang, wallop", but if
only there'd been a plot to accompany this.
The extras begin with four featurettes. Jet Li is "The One" (13 mins)
mixes film clips with chat from the cast and crew about how wonderful he is,
Multiverses create "The One" (19 mins) looks more at the how the action
scenes were put together, About Face (6 mins) concentrates on the idea
of Jet Li fighting himself and The Many Faces of Jet Li (2 mins) shows the actor
getting dressed up for photo shoots for the many characters we see only in
pictures early on in the film, as well as the ones he gets to act out as.
Trailers for this film plus four others follow
(The 6th Day,
A Knight's Tale,
Hollow Man and
The Thirteenth Floor),
there are Filmographies for director James Wong and the main four
actors and then comes the Animatic Comparison (1 min) where a film clip is
compared to basic CGI and work with what looks like Lego models(!)
A feature-length audio commentary from the director and several crew members
closes the extras.
There are 28 chapters to the film, the subtitles are in four languages
(English - with extra subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing, French - with
a subtitled commentary, Arabic and Columbia's favourite, Hindi - I say that
because no other company seems to bother, although Warner have an affinity for Arabic)
and the main menu features chase music and clips from the film.
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
