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.

Three Films Make A Post: A dangerous land breeds a dangerous man.

Siberia (2018): I’m pretty sure Matthew Ross’s Siberia was meant to be some sort of neo noir, using its Keanu Reeves protagonist’s misadventures in shady diamond dealings and cheating in Russia as a means to show his alienation and probably say something about the US’s standing in the world right now too. Alas, what we actually get is a film whose characters are as clichéd as they are uninvolving, and played with little conviction by a cast that seem to have been provided with little usable direction. What little there is of a plot moves with all the verve of a dead snail, lacking any and all interesting detail. Direction-wise, this is a slick, personality-less concoction that looks pretty but doesn’t create a mood, or a world for its characters to inhabit, nor does it create much of a point for anything going on in it, very slowly.

Sequence Break (2017): Equally unsuccessful but at least more ambitious is this Cronenberg without the philosophy but with arcade consoles bit by Graham Skipper (whom I know better as an extremely dependable indie genre movie actor). Stylistically, this really wants to be a Panos Cosmatos movie – or at least loves the same things about Cronenberg movies Cosmatos loves – but it never quite manages to create the proper mood of dream/nightmare/insanity, and is at its heart too friendly and romantic to really hit the philsophical and aesthetical extremes of its models. It is borrowing their surfaces instead of their cores and never quite manages to convince me of its own core.

Blood and Money aka Allagash (2020): Also dwelling completely in very traditional genre structures, character types and ideas, John Barr’s movie concerning an old hunter (Tom Berenger) stumbling into conflict with a brutal gang of robbers in the Allagash is much better at bringing them to life than this week’s other films. In part, that’s thanks to Barr’s slow yet focussed direction style, in part thanks to a performance by a Berenger clearly happy to get a role with a bit of substance his late work isn’t exactly full of, and in part simply because Barr (who also co-wrote this with Alan Petherick) knows how to flesh out tropes and connect them to actual life.


It’s also a film very clear about the utter, existential uselessness of its characters’ struggles, Berenger making one bad decision after the other in a mixture of bad habit, bad luck and an ill-understood idea of redemption that’s going to redeem nobody and improve nothing in the world.

Sinners and Saints (2010)

Post-Katrina New Orleans. Policeman Sean Riley (Johnny Strong) is in about as bad a shape as is his city. His little son died a couple of years ago from an illness, his wife left him, and he’s a husk of a man drawn ever further into cycles of violence. Consequently, we find him straight-up murder the man who just shot his partner (a cameo by good old Kim Coates in one of his few non-gangster stints as an honest cop). Things will go even downhill from here, for Sean soon finds himself invited into a particularly horrible homicide investigation. Detective Will Glanz (Kevin Phillips) is the lucky bastard tasked with solving a series of killings whose victims are set on fire, then doused with a fire extinguisher, then set on fire again, and so on. Sean’s supposed to be his street crime expert.

As luck will have it, Colin (Sean Patrick Flanery), an old army buddy of Sean’s seems to be involved in the whole messy affair, though it’ll take some time to clear up if he’s working for the guy leading the killers (Costas Mandylor), is a direct part of the crimes, or what. What’s clear early on is that Sean’s nearly suicidal violent tendencies – and his efficacy as a killer – might actually be the appropriate tools to solve this particular case.

William Kaufman is one of the good handful of truly great, individual voices doing direct to video action films in the USA during the last fifteen or twenty years. In Kaufman’s films, there are little if any of the writing and acting short cuts you usually find in these affairs, nor are these films that can’t afford to show any actual action.

Sure, the more up-market actors here – among them Tom Berenger, Jürgen Prochnow, Jolene Blalock and the inevitable Method Man – are only on screen in a few scenes in what amounts to cameos but unlike the typical way direct to video action often operates where certain characters are only in a film because the filmmakers have Dolph or Jean-Claude for a shooting day, here these actors are cast in roles that are actually part of the plot; well, the Prochnow character might not have been absolutely necessary, but what the hey. Kaufman – who co-wrote the script with Jay Moses – clearly knows how to construct his action film as something with an actual plot, and while it is certainly one full of clichés, it uses its clichés with the kind of conviction that turns them into something a little more satisfying than you’d expect. There’s also the plain fact that Kaufman in general uses standards character types and tropes with a great degree of intelligence and care, putting the decisive bit more thought into standard character arcs and actually writing characters instead of character types. Why, Sean Riley often feels like a person as much as he does the Cop on the Edge.

Interestingly enough, the film even has some ethical concerns about what the things its main character does so well say about him as a human being, or rather, what parts of his humanity they might destroy. At the same time – which makes rather a lot of sense for an action flick – Sinners and Saints is also very specifically interested in how abhorrent acts of violence may or may not be justified depending on one’s position. It’s certainly a more thoughtful approach than you usual find in direct to video action, and it leads to a film which features certain Cop on the Edge movie standard scenes it can approach from a somewhat different angle.

On the acting side, Johnny Strong isn’t quite as, well, strong as I would have wished for the role. He’s not terribly good at acting out the more nuanced emotional beats, though he’s certainly not phoning things in, nor does he ever feel like robot or inadvertently funny. He’s just not quite there. He’s certainly a fine action performer, though, which goes a long way in this context. Costas Mandylor for his part does some fine scenery chewing (but not too much), a weird accent, and is believable as a guy who does truly horrible things as a matter of course.


Last but not least, the action is pretty terrific, with various violent shoot-outs, as well as a few more acrobatic bits, all staged by Kaufman with a sort of casual surety that really sells them as gritty and exciting.