One Shot film review: Single take movie is a violent action curio
Scott Adkins, undisputed king of the On Demand action movie, saves the free world once again in ‘single take’ action thriller One Shot.
He plays Jake Harris, a Navy SEAL leading an elite team to a prison island where terrorists are being held. His mission is to escort government analyst Zoe Anderson (Ashley Greene) and suspect Amin Mansur (Waleed Elgadi) to Washington where Mansur will be interrogated about a suspected bomb in the capital. The routine trip is scuppered by invading terrorist militia, trapping Jake in a desperate fight for survival.
While there are subtle edits, the appearance of one continuous shot gives the well-choreographed action a sense of urgency, turning the story into a live action computer game. Except, most modern games have a better story than this. It’s around 18 minutes before Adkins mumbles “something’s not right”, and all pretence of a plot is thrown out the window. From there it’s a bullet-fest, with our brave American boys picking off the indeterminate foreign baddies one by one on an RAF base in Suffolk. It’s loud, it’s grimy, and will meet only the lowest Saturday night flick expectations.
Prior to the melee, every action cliché is rolled out. There’s an awful back-and- forth between Greene and Adkins (“did they teach you that in SEAL school?”), and hushed references to real life inci- dents that feel like Team America’s “9/11 times a hundred!” gag. There’s a confrontational higher up (a bored Ryan Phillipe), a soldier who just wants to get home to his daughter (guess what happens to him), and a terror leader who is the stuff of jingoistic nightmares.
One variation on the formula is Elgadi as the captive, who keeps you guessing as to how much he knows. Despite the wobbly dialogue, the Four Lions and 355 actor conveys the pain that drives many to turn to terror. Elsewhere, Greene stares blankly as she lays out tostakes to Adkins, but doesn’t go as far as to foster any on-screen chemistry. The star of the show knows his strengths and plays to them, handling moments of drama almost as ably as he handles a machine gun.
The One Take camera technique is new enough in mainstream cinema to make One Shot interesting to action fanatics, but only those who wants a relentless shower of violence will be entertained by the onslaught.