The One
Read between the universes
To a lower- or middle-class person, hiring a rockstar to perform at your birthday might seem an exorbitant waste of money.
But to a rich person, it isn’t a waste, but an investment that ensures your party will be attended by even wealthier people, giving you the opportunity to grow even richer.
That it caters to your inner child is just a pleasant side effect.
Professional rich men like Napoleon Hill and Robert Kiyosaki who insist(ed) wealth is a state of mind, define(d) a poor person as someone with a stunted imagination, incapable of having a rock star perform at their birthday not because of poverty but a lack of creativity.
So, my question to you is, if you could hire a celebrity to do something fun and it burdened you no more than a trip to the dry cleaners might, who would you pick and what would you ask them to do?
Having an impoverished mind, I had no idea
…..until I saw Jet Li’s 2001 opus, The One.
Afterwards I knew that if I were wealthy, I would hire Jason Statham to explain the multiverse.
In The One, Statham’s character, Multiverse Agent Funsch, corners Jet Li and explains how black holes make it possible to travel between universes.
He does this with such eloquence, compassion and zeal that it transcends language.
I recall Stephen Hawking once attempting to explain something similar but it just wasn’t as convincing.
I’ll admit, part of the novelty was hearing Statham talk about something other than driving really fast and beating people up, which are the only things he ever does in this universe.
But that, of course, is the whole point of The One.
That, and Jason Li running up vertical surfaces and juggling motorcycles.
Li is one of the few performers who can make such things look convincing on camera, although he does have a bit a help suspending audience disbelief via wire work, CGI and…
The Plot: Gabriel Yulaw (Jet Li) has been found guilty of murdering 123 people, each one of whom was an alternate version of himself living in another universe.
Yulaw did this by abusing his powers as a Multiverse Agent, law enforcement from a highly advanced civilization in the future.
Yulaw’s motive was a belief that killing his other selves would make him stronger and that killing all of them will make him invincible.
For his crimes, Yulaw is sentenced to life imprisonment in the “Hades Universe’, but just as the bailiff is firing up the wormhole machine, a buxom red haired femme fatale (Carla Gugino) uses her high heeled shoes to help him escape.
And where does a serial killer who can move between universes choose to escape to,?
Why to turn of the millennium LA of course!
That is where his only surviving alter ego lives.
Gabe Law (also Jet Li) is a hardworking, honest cop married to a kind hearted veterinarian named TK (also Carla Gugino).
When he is attacked and nearly murdered by Yulaw the experience is so shocking he’s convinced it was a hallucination and books a brain scan, failing to realize that being strapped into an MRI machine leaves him hopelessly vulnerable to Yulaw, who is posing as an orderly nearby.
Hopeless, that is, unless Multiverse Agents Rodecker (Delroy Lindo) and Funsch (Jason Statham) can intervene!
These are the two trans dimensional lawman that originally brought Yulaw to justice and they are determined to do again.
But will they do it in time?!?
?!?!?!?!?!?!
In this current age where Spiderman: No Way Home is an international hit and Everything Everywhere All at Once won best picture, it might be hard to accept that the multiverse was once a very radical idea.
But in 2001, the year The One was released, director/writer James Wong was at great pains to ensure the intricacy and hard science fiction of this film were hidden behind endless fights and explosions.
He had to do this. The aughts were consistently indifferent and frequently hostile to intelligence in movies.
But for viewers willing to look between the wire work, there are moments of true poetry and brilliance, like Jason Statham explaining the singularity.
And if you’re not willing to do that you can still enjoy The One.
Just count the explosions and car crashes and bang your head to “Down With the Sickness’, which was on the soundtrack to absolutely every movie released in 2001.
Maybe not Pearl Harbour.
Ooh-wah-ah-ah-ah!
