One Shot (2021) / One More Shot (2024)

The main selling point of James Nunn’s tale about a Navy Seals squad lead by Jake Harris (house favourite Scott Adkins) having to survive a terrorist siege when they’re about to guard the transport of an inmate of one of those US torture camps for prisoners that officially don’t exist anymore is that is indeed a one shot movie. Logistically, that’s a rather impressive feat even in the age of digital editing, particularly since the film’s action sequences are often surprisingly complicated; I can’t even imagine how difficult it must be to get an choreography together for the hand to hand combat.

Despite the pretty unpleasant torture camp setting, and the restrictions of the one shot style, there’s quite a bit of decently effective character work here as well, enough so that every character at least has believable motivations – even some of the villains are allowed to be human beings. Human beings played by some fine character actors and a very game Ashley Greene to boot, so there’s a surprising amount of humanity in between the exciting murder and explosions.

Made three years later or so, One More Shot takes place only a couple of flight hours after the first film. Harris, the only survivor of his team and his prisoner Amin Mansur (Waleed Elgadi) land not exactly in the country they were expecting to end up in, and soon find themselves thrust into a mercenary attack on the airport, as masterminded by one Robert Jackson (Michael Jai White). As it turns out, the supposed Islamist terrorism case is only a set-up for an attempted coup in the USA.

Harris, not exactly the biggest fan of Mansur after the first film, finds himself dragged into protecting the man as well as Mansur’s pregnant wife while also figuring out what exactly is going on.

This second film is a nice escalation of the first one, sharing most of its virtues – character actors doing their stuff admirably (hi, Tom Berenger) under one shot circumstances, and action sequences that look bigger and even more complicated to set up. The car crash bit does frankly look a bit insane to me to actually have been pulled off.

The plot’s turn into the more convoluted does sit better with me as the old evil Muslim thing but it also does make the second movie somewhat less plausible. Fortunately, I’m not really going into a Scott Adkins movie looking for plausibility – everything else you might want from a low budget action movie, these two films deliver.