Blockbuster History: Fun with parallel universes
Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. Last week (and also this week, and very likely next week also): that redoubtable old speculative fiction mainstay, the multiverse, has gotten its biggest-ever cinematic presentation in the form of Marvel's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. But in a different universe (DO YOU GET IT?) maybe there could have been a billion-dollar blockbuster that did the same thing only with considerably more nü-metal.
Dumb movies come in many flavors. There is the mean dumbness of mediocrity; there's the smug dumbness of a movie that thinks it is much smarter and more meaningful than it is; there's the over-the-top, feverishly garish imbecility of the so-bad-it's-good and so-bad-it's-really-bad gutter trash. And so on. I am tempted to say, though, that the most affable, watchable kind of dumb is the cheesy, super-earnest idiocy of a movie made by people who like really fucking love movies, man, and want to share that love with an audience by slopping in everything they think is awesome and fun and cool. This isn't an airtight heuristic: I'm basically describing the entire filmography of Michael Bay here, and I could hardly name a director whose films I find overall less affable and more unwatchable. Still, watching a film that's just so puppy-dog eager to cram as much of whatever dumb-ass nonsense it likes into a running time that can't hold up to it has the undeniable appeal of unembarrassed honesty and this gets us to The One from 2001, an sci-fi film action film starring the great Hong Kong action icon Jet Li during the peak of "Hollywood has not a god-damned clue what to do with Jet Li.
The One is, by absolutely every measure I can think of, so fucking dumb, and its dumbness is magnified by how technobabbly its concept is, so you really do have to pay some pretty close attention to be able to follow the plot. But it knows that it's dumb, isn't ashamed of it, isn't trying to do anything to disguise that fact. It's the film that director James Wong and co-writer Glen Morgan made right plop in-between Final Destination and Final Destination 3, and the three movies absolutely feel like a continuum. They are all connected by a spirited feeling of "dude, wouldn't it be cool if...?", and the mere fact that the answer is "no, actually it would be kind of stupid" doesn't do much to put a dent into the obvious fun Wong and Morgan are having. These are not dumb men - they were arguably the two most reliable writers in the history of The X-Files, which spent the decade prior to The One establishing itself as American television's most sophisticated series - but despite its elaborate high concept, The One has no greater ambitions than to arrange for a situation wherein, by the end of its 87 minutes (and to be clear, part of the film's appeal is very much that it knows not to demand more of our time than it can justify), A) Jet Li will have had a wire-fu fight with himself (actually his face digitally pasted onto a stuntman, but close enough, and B) he will walk through a rainfall of shiny golden shards of molten metal at a certain point in doing so.
The scenario devised to bring these obviously wonderful ideas to pass feels like several '90s sci-fi movies were put into a blender, not least of them being The Matrix, of course (nobody would have possibly thought of calling a movie released in 2001 The One if they weren't openly trying to rip-off The Matrix). But the central hook is more like a mangled attempt to remake Highlander as an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation: so, there's a multiverse. Some of the individual universes within that multiverse have figured this fact out, and established a police agency, the Multiverse Authority (MVA), to prevent e.g. madmen from hopping between realities, killing the alternate versions of themselves, absorbing their life energy, and eventually becoming "the one" version of themself, at which point they will be unstoppable beings of pure power.
The MVA isn't good at this, unfortunately, and an ex-agent named Gabriel Yulaw (Li) has been zooming from universe to universe murdering himself; we catch up with him right as he kills his 123rd alter-ego, at which point he trips up and is captured by MVA agents Funsch (Jason Statham, using a simply abhorrent American accent) and Roedecker (Delroy Lindo). Yulaw is awfully darn powerful at this point, though, having absorbed so many of his fellow selves, and he's able to break out with very little effort to jump into the universe where the 124th and final parallel him lives, a workaday Los Angeles police officer named Gabe Law. For it appears to be our universe, one of the ones that hasn't gotten wind of the multiverse yet, so Gabe has no idea what's going on when he meets a very hostile, murderous mirror of himself. And turns out that Yulaw hasn't exactly been absorbing the power of his other selves, he's been redistributing it among all the remaining Yulaws - so Gabe, for reasons he hasn't been able to figure out, has been growing steadily stronger this whole time, and is at this point Yulaw's equal in fighting ability, though not of course in evil intent.
This is a lot of backstory that The One frankly has very little interest in exploring. Once Yulaw, Roedecker, and Funsch arrive in Gabe's universe, the movie pretty much stays there; there are a few gags that draw on the gimmick to more or less good effect (we see a photo of a dead Yulaw variant in a universe where he was Swedish, giving us the delightfully awful sight of Li in a blond wig; we briefly cross paths with this universe's Roedecker, played with appropriately goggle-eyed confusion by Lindo), but presumably for budgetary reasons, the filmmakers can't just keep leaping from world to world.
The result is a singularly unambitious police-chasing-madmen tale, in which all of the lean running time basically consists of everybody racing to the same warehouse so that Gabe and Yulaw can fight each other. Up to that point, it's barely even an action movie; I repeat myself, but Hollywood really never did figure out what they were doing with Li. Nor with any of the other East Asian action stars and directors that started coming over to the States in the '90s, to be fair (Jackie Chan probably comes the closest, and I still don't think you could find a single soul who'd sincerely argue that his American films are appreciably close to as as good as his Hong Kong ones), but Li seemed to get saddled with some exceptionally bad projects. The One doesn't really break that pattern, though it has the goods where it counts: the climax is superb, coming as close as an American film could to capturing the breatheless, airborne energy of the fight sequences in Li's Chinese-language work. Which isn't necessarily all that close, but the kineticism of the bodies in motion is engrossing, and their movements inform the fluid camera work that finally starts to feel purposeful and focused, not just busy. And, as mentioned, this all culminates in watching Li stride through a torrent of hot metal streams, a golden rainstorm of "this makes no sense but it is awesome to look at" that captures, for just one perfect shot, the absurd visual poetry of the action cinema Li had temporarily left behind.
If all of The One were at that level... nay, even if a good chunk of The One were at that level, we'd have a real action classic on our hands. Instead, it's just a dumb good time; but I would steadily argue that the "good time" of it more than compensates for the "dumb". For one thing, it is clearly not trying not to be dumb. In keeping with the way action sci-fi operated at the dawn of the 21st Century, the score is made up of almost literally non-stop nü-metal, including both "Bodies" by Drowning Pool and "Down with the Sickness" by Disturbed. I think it would be easy to go too far in crediting this as a creative choice - in 2001, what soundtrack would this have it were not nü-metal? - but the constant anthemic yelling gives the film an unmistakable propulsive quality, a feeling of being hooked up to an adrenaline drip. And the more that The One threatens to turn into a metal video, the more the music begins to feel like a happy bit of goofing around, just cranking up some hard rock with your bros Jet Li and Other Jet Li. It's energetic and smiling and completely without a sense of shame, and even if it's also kind of trash, it's not trashy.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Dumb movies come in many flavors. There is the mean dumbness of mediocrity; there's the smug dumbness of a movie that thinks it is much smarter and more meaningful than it is; there's the over-the-top, feverishly garish imbecility of the so-bad-it's-good and so-bad-it's-really-bad gutter trash. And so on. I am tempted to say, though, that the most affable, watchable kind of dumb is the cheesy, super-earnest idiocy of a movie made by people who like really fucking love movies, man, and want to share that love with an audience by slopping in everything they think is awesome and fun and cool. This isn't an airtight heuristic: I'm basically describing the entire filmography of Michael Bay here, and I could hardly name a director whose films I find overall less affable and more unwatchable. Still, watching a film that's just so puppy-dog eager to cram as much of whatever dumb-ass nonsense it likes into a running time that can't hold up to it has the undeniable appeal of unembarrassed honesty and this gets us to The One from 2001, an sci-fi film action film starring the great Hong Kong action icon Jet Li during the peak of "Hollywood has not a god-damned clue what to do with Jet Li.
The One is, by absolutely every measure I can think of, so fucking dumb, and its dumbness is magnified by how technobabbly its concept is, so you really do have to pay some pretty close attention to be able to follow the plot. But it knows that it's dumb, isn't ashamed of it, isn't trying to do anything to disguise that fact. It's the film that director James Wong and co-writer Glen Morgan made right plop in-between Final Destination and Final Destination 3, and the three movies absolutely feel like a continuum. They are all connected by a spirited feeling of "dude, wouldn't it be cool if...?", and the mere fact that the answer is "no, actually it would be kind of stupid" doesn't do much to put a dent into the obvious fun Wong and Morgan are having. These are not dumb men - they were arguably the two most reliable writers in the history of The X-Files, which spent the decade prior to The One establishing itself as American television's most sophisticated series - but despite its elaborate high concept, The One has no greater ambitions than to arrange for a situation wherein, by the end of its 87 minutes (and to be clear, part of the film's appeal is very much that it knows not to demand more of our time than it can justify), A) Jet Li will have had a wire-fu fight with himself (actually his face digitally pasted onto a stuntman, but close enough, and B) he will walk through a rainfall of shiny golden shards of molten metal at a certain point in doing so.
The scenario devised to bring these obviously wonderful ideas to pass feels like several '90s sci-fi movies were put into a blender, not least of them being The Matrix, of course (nobody would have possibly thought of calling a movie released in 2001 The One if they weren't openly trying to rip-off The Matrix). But the central hook is more like a mangled attempt to remake Highlander as an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation: so, there's a multiverse. Some of the individual universes within that multiverse have figured this fact out, and established a police agency, the Multiverse Authority (MVA), to prevent e.g. madmen from hopping between realities, killing the alternate versions of themselves, absorbing their life energy, and eventually becoming "the one" version of themself, at which point they will be unstoppable beings of pure power.
The MVA isn't good at this, unfortunately, and an ex-agent named Gabriel Yulaw (Li) has been zooming from universe to universe murdering himself; we catch up with him right as he kills his 123rd alter-ego, at which point he trips up and is captured by MVA agents Funsch (Jason Statham, using a simply abhorrent American accent) and Roedecker (Delroy Lindo). Yulaw is awfully darn powerful at this point, though, having absorbed so many of his fellow selves, and he's able to break out with very little effort to jump into the universe where the 124th and final parallel him lives, a workaday Los Angeles police officer named Gabe Law. For it appears to be our universe, one of the ones that hasn't gotten wind of the multiverse yet, so Gabe has no idea what's going on when he meets a very hostile, murderous mirror of himself. And turns out that Yulaw hasn't exactly been absorbing the power of his other selves, he's been redistributing it among all the remaining Yulaws - so Gabe, for reasons he hasn't been able to figure out, has been growing steadily stronger this whole time, and is at this point Yulaw's equal in fighting ability, though not of course in evil intent.
This is a lot of backstory that The One frankly has very little interest in exploring. Once Yulaw, Roedecker, and Funsch arrive in Gabe's universe, the movie pretty much stays there; there are a few gags that draw on the gimmick to more or less good effect (we see a photo of a dead Yulaw variant in a universe where he was Swedish, giving us the delightfully awful sight of Li in a blond wig; we briefly cross paths with this universe's Roedecker, played with appropriately goggle-eyed confusion by Lindo), but presumably for budgetary reasons, the filmmakers can't just keep leaping from world to world.
The result is a singularly unambitious police-chasing-madmen tale, in which all of the lean running time basically consists of everybody racing to the same warehouse so that Gabe and Yulaw can fight each other. Up to that point, it's barely even an action movie; I repeat myself, but Hollywood really never did figure out what they were doing with Li. Nor with any of the other East Asian action stars and directors that started coming over to the States in the '90s, to be fair (Jackie Chan probably comes the closest, and I still don't think you could find a single soul who'd sincerely argue that his American films are appreciably close to as as good as his Hong Kong ones), but Li seemed to get saddled with some exceptionally bad projects. The One doesn't really break that pattern, though it has the goods where it counts: the climax is superb, coming as close as an American film could to capturing the breatheless, airborne energy of the fight sequences in Li's Chinese-language work. Which isn't necessarily all that close, but the kineticism of the bodies in motion is engrossing, and their movements inform the fluid camera work that finally starts to feel purposeful and focused, not just busy. And, as mentioned, this all culminates in watching Li stride through a torrent of hot metal streams, a golden rainstorm of "this makes no sense but it is awesome to look at" that captures, for just one perfect shot, the absurd visual poetry of the action cinema Li had temporarily left behind.
If all of The One were at that level... nay, even if a good chunk of The One were at that level, we'd have a real action classic on our hands. Instead, it's just a dumb good time; but I would steadily argue that the "good time" of it more than compensates for the "dumb". For one thing, it is clearly not trying not to be dumb. In keeping with the way action sci-fi operated at the dawn of the 21st Century, the score is made up of almost literally non-stop nü-metal, including both "Bodies" by Drowning Pool and "Down with the Sickness" by Disturbed. I think it would be easy to go too far in crediting this as a creative choice - in 2001, what soundtrack would this have it were not nü-metal? - but the constant anthemic yelling gives the film an unmistakable propulsive quality, a feeling of being hooked up to an adrenaline drip. And the more that The One threatens to turn into a metal video, the more the music begins to feel like a happy bit of goofing around, just cranking up some hard rock with your bros Jet Li and Other Jet Li. It's energetic and smiling and completely without a sense of shame, and even if it's also kind of trash, it's not trashy.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
