Gabriel Yulaw uses a device to travel through various alternate universes in order to kill 124 different versions of himself. This causes an effect in which after each murder he "absorbs" more powers from his alternate universe self, hoping to become a God-like being. Gabriel is arrested by Multiverse Authority agents Funsch and Rodecker and sentenced on a trial, but he escapes to the last universe to kill the last version of himself, Gabe Law, a police officer in Los Angeles. When Gabriel kills Gabe's girlfriend T.K., the police hunt down the innocent Gabe, not believing he has an evil double. Rodecker is also killed, but Gabe and Funsch team up to defeat Gabriel and return him to his sentence, namely to be sent off to an alternate universe of Hell. Gabe is sent to an alternate universe where he meets a different version of T.K., who is a veterinary there.
After "Everything Everywhere All at Once", a renewed interest was sparked to retroactively check out James Wong's earlier film "The One", which also combined martial arts, action and the multiverse worlds into a peculiar whole. Take away the humor, emotions, cinematic creativity and philosophy from "Everything Everywhere", and you get "The One", a simple and straight-forward action film, but a one which still has enough merits and virtues to be a good film, among others because Jet Li's martial arts skills are simply indestructible. After a 'committee appointed' schematic intro explaining the concept of several alternate universes, the movie actually starts off pretty well with a subtle scene in which news on TV mention US President Al Gore, implying an alternate world where the politician won the election. The concept of the "evil" antagonist killing his aternate selves to absorb their powers makes sense, while the good version of himself is there to confront him (both are played by Jet Li), which makes for some hints at yin and yang, though the execution is rather routine and standard, settling only for fights and chase sequences. Therea are only two truly standout ideas that exploit this concept at a higher level: in the first, after agent Rodecker is killed, his partner Funsch meets a man at the gas station who is the exact alternate universe version of Rodecker, and so Funsch thanks him for all the things his alternate self did to help him in the alternate timeline. The other is when the evil Gabriel tricks Gabe's girlfriend into thinking he is actually Gabe. The rest is often underwhelming and stale, sometimes even abrupt, without elaborating some plot points, though it did become an unlikely forerunner to the trend of numerous multiverse movies which came after it.
Grade:++
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