November 1–8, 2001

movie shorts

The One

The increasing digitization of movies leads to the inevitable fear that real actors might someday be replaced by digital counterparts. But in that case of Jet Li, that might be preferable. A cigar-store Indian of an actor with no screen presence or charisma, Li’s only draw is his ability to perform martial arts stunts, and when, as in The One, most of those stunts are accomplished with digital trickery, you wonder why they don’t just go whole hog and zap him out of the picture entirely. Written and directed by the team of Glen Morgan and James Wong — whose movie work (Final Destination) isn’t a patch on their groovy X-Files episodes — The One plays like a video-game tie-in for which the video game has yet to be invented. A spoken-prologue, so trailer-like the audience didn’t seem to know the movie had started, makes a half-hearted attempt to explain the plot: something about an overlapping "multiverse" where each universe contains analogues of the same people, and a super-criminal (Li) who’s wiping out all his analogues and accumulating their collective life-force. The words you’re looking for are "what" and "ever." A handful of no-doubt-costly but lifeless digital effects are the movie’s raison d’être; the rest is "all your base are belong to us"-level dialogue barely audible over the listless wall-to-wall rock score. The best thing you can say about The One is that, at 80 minutes, it’s over quickly; the worst thing you can say is that’s not nearly quick enough.

—Sam Adams

(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Cinemagic; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St., UA Riverview; UA Sameric; UA 69th St.)