9 / 10
Official trailer
The One ranks among the most underrated parallel universe action films ever made.
Seen twice. The 9 rating is what it earns. James Wong directing. Jet Li in a dual role as both protagonist and antagonist. Jason Statham in an early American role. Carla Gugino as the woman who connects the two Lis. Delroy Lindo as the senior universe agent. A premise that uses parallel universes for body-stealing power accumulation instead of as general world-building. Released in November 2001, two months after September 11 reshaped Hollywood action releases.
The timing buried the film. The work survives.
I’m a sucker for this movie. A man murdering his way through a hundred and twenty-three versions of himself to become something close to a god is the kind of pulp premise I adore, and Jet Li fighting Jet Li delivers exactly what that premise promises. It’s lean, fast and smarter about its multiverse than it had any reason to be, and I don’t understand why it gets waved off as a throwaway.
The Setup
The Multiverse contains 125 parallel universes. Each universe has its own version of every person. The universes are connected through monitored portals worked by the Multiverse Authority, a law enforcement agency. Travel between universes is permitted but tightly regulated.
Yulaw (Jet Li) is a former Multiverse Authority agent who has been hunting his own alternate selves.
Each time he kills one of his alternates, the dead version’s energy and capability distribute across the remaining selves. He’s killed 123 of his 125 versions. Two remain. Killing the last alternate will make him “The One,” a being whose physical and mental capability exceeds all known limits.
Gabe Law (Jet Li in the dual role) is a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy in our universe and one of the last two surviving alternates.
He has no idea his other selves are being killed. He’s been getting stronger and faster for years and assumes it’s his training paying off. Yulaw arrives in our universe to finish his project, and agents Roedecker (Delroy Lindo) and Funsch (Jason Statham) pursue him to stop it. The film documents the collision.
The Parallel Universe Premise
Most parallel universe films use the premise for world-building. The What If approach. Sliding Doors (1998). The Family Man (2000). What if this character had made a different choice? The One uses the premise differently. The 125 universes are different existing versions of the protagonist who all live. The premise is closer to comic book multiverse than to alternative history.
The body-stealing mechanic is the film’s specific creative contribution.
Killing alternates concentrates power. The structure works as both action engine and moral question. Yulaw is stealing power from versions of himself. The other selves are equally him. He’s murdering himself to make himself stronger. The mechanic gives the action sequences moral weight that most action films lack.
The constraint generates the film’s dramatic tension. Yulaw can’t be killed by ordinary means. Each kill makes him faster and stronger. The Multiverse Authority can’t match his capability through training because he’s been training across 125 lifetimes at once. Gabe has to kill Yulaw because Gabe is the only person whose capability has grown alongside Yulaw’s. The two are equally matched in ways no other characters can be.
The mechanic is what hooked me. I think Yulaw killing his own selves is a darker and better villain motive than world domination, and I like that the film never stops to moralize about it. The detail that Gabe has been getting stronger off the deaths of men he’s never met, and thinks it’s his workouts paying off, is a wonderfully creepy touch.
For Writers
A parallel universe premise can serve character work instead of world-building, and The One shows how. Most parallel universe stories spend their runtime exploring alternate versions of the world. The One spends its runtime exploring alternate versions of one person. The structure is narrower and more dramatically productive. The audience cares about Gabe and Yulaw because they’re the same person making different choices. Viewers don’t have to track multiple parallel worlds. They only have to track two versions of the same character.
The lesson for writers is that high-concept premises work better when scoped to character instead of to environment. If your parallel universe story is about how the world is different, your story is a tourism brochure. If your parallel universe story is about how one person is different, your story is character drama with an unusual frame.
The Jet Li Dual Performance
Jet Li plays both Yulaw and Gabe. The two characters are physically identical but work with different physical languages. Yulaw moves with practiced precision. He’s trained across decades. He kills efficiently. He doesn’t show effort. Gabe moves with the natural athleticism of a sheriff’s deputy who works out. He’s trained, but he hasn’t trained at Yulaw’s level. The contrast is the performance.
Li’s two performances win me over completely. He gives the two men different bodies, and I could tell which one I was watching in a wide shot before either of them said a word. Yulaw’s stillness scares me more than any of his kills.
The duplicate work was done through a combination of split-screen, body doubles, and motion capture techniques that were ambitious for 2001. Many scenes show both characters in the same frame interacting. The interactions had to look like two physical people occupying the same space. The film delivers on this consistently. The audience accepts the doubling because the technical work is invisible.
Li was at peak during the production. He’d moved from his Hong Kong career through Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), Romeo Must Die (2000), and Kiss of the Dragon (2001) into American action production. The One was his most ambitious American project to that point. Later films would be more conventional. Li’s American period was approximately fifteen years. The One is one of its strongest entries.
The Jason Statham Performance
Jason Statham appears in an early American supporting role as Agent Funsch.
The performance is interesting in retrospect because Statham was about a year and a half away from The Transporter (2002). That would establish him as an action lead. The Funsch role is the transitional moment between his British roles and the leading-man period that followed.
Statham plays Funsch as the younger partner to Delroy Lindo’s senior agent. He follows orders. He shoots competently. He doesn’t get a defining solo sequence.
The role is standard partner-cop material in a parallel universe context. What’s notable is that Statham brings physical presence to a role that doesn’t require physical presence. The performance is small. It’s also the kind of small role that established him as someone studios should consider for larger roles.
My one real complaint sits right here. I’d have given Statham a fight of his own, because the film parks him next to a star and has him shoot at things when he was obviously capable of a lot more. It’s a small waste in a film that doesn’t waste much else.
Statham went on to The Transporter franchise, the Crank films, the Fast and Furious series, and heavy later action filmography. The One is the moment before his American career properly began. Watching it now is watching an actor who’s about to become a star but doesn’t yet know it.
The Carla Gugino Performance
Carla Gugino plays T.K. Law, Gabe’s wife. The role is structurally smaller than the leads but emotionally central. Yulaw kills T.K. in his attack on Gabe’s house. The death is the film’s emotional engine. Gabe’s grief is the motivation for his final confrontation with Yulaw. Gugino has to establish the relationship convincingly enough that the audience feels the loss when it comes.
Gugino was in the transition between her television work (Spin City, Karen Sisco) and the wider film career that would develop across the 2000s. Sin City (2005), Watchmen (2009), and the Spy Kids franchise (2001-2003) were all approaching. The One was her work during the period when she was establishing the range that later productions would draw on.
The Gabe-T.K. relationship is the film’s calmest moment. They have a barbecue in the backyard. They tease each other about Gabe’s escalating physical capability. They go to bed together. The domesticity is brief because the film is an action thriller, but the time spent on it is the basis for everything that follows. Yulaw can’t take T.K. from Gabe if Gugino hasn’t made the audience care about T.K. first. The film succeeds because of Gugino.
The James Wong Direction
James Wong came to The One from a long collaboration with Glen Morgan on The X-Files. The two had also written and produced Final Destination (2000) together. Wong directed The One while Morgan produced. The combination was specific. Both men understood high-concept genre material and were comfortable with the structural ambition The One required.
The direction is workmanlike but committed. Wong doesn’t impose a visual signature on the material. He delivers the action sequences cleanly. He stages the dramatic scenes with suitable restraint. The combination produces a film that feels professional throughout. The action sequences hold up better than the dramatic scenes, but neither lets the film down.
The career trajectory after The One was mixed.
Wong directed Final Destination 3 (2006) and Dragonball Evolution (2009). The Dragonball film was a disaster that effectively ended his Hollywood directing career. He returned to television work. The One remains one of the cleaner examples of what Wong could do when the material gave him room to work.
For Writers
To drive the final confrontation, The One uses the death of the protagonist’s wife. The technique is conventional. The trick is that the film justifies the death by establishing the relationship in the time the structure allows. The audience cares about T.K. because Gugino plays her as a complete person instead of as a wife function. The lesson for writers is that fridge stuffing only works if you treat the character whose death you need before you kill them.
If your stakes-establishing death happens to a character the audience hasn’t invested in, the death generates no stakes. If your stakes-establishing death happens to a character the audience has come to like, the death generates the engine the third act needs. The One does this efficiently. Other action films of the period didn’t.
The Fight Choreography
The action sequences in The One use techniques drawn from both Hong Kong wire-fu and Hollywood action choreography. The fight sequences feature elements that exceed conventional human capability without going fully into superhero territory. Yulaw and Gabe move at speeds that mortals can’t match. They lift objects that mortals can’t lift. They survive impacts that mortals can’t survive.
The final fight between Yulaw and Gabe is the film’s signature sequence.
The two physically identical fighters battle in a power station while each shows the physical and martial capability that 124 dead alternates have given them. The choreography requires both versions of Jet Li to perform at the same superhuman level while remaining distinguishable through small physical cues. The sequence pays off the dual performance work that the entire film has been setting up.
That power station fight is the reason the rating sits at a 9. Two Jet Lis trading blows at full speed, each still readable as his own man, is the payoff I wanted from the first reel, and Corey Yuen doesn’t cheat me out of a single beat of it.
Corey Yuen, who had collaborated with Jet Li since Li’s early Hong Kong career, supervised the choreography.
Yuen would also choreograph The Transporter (2002) for Statham. The choreographer’s influence on both careers is significant and deserves more recognition than it’s received. The One shows what Yuen could do with high production budget and willing performers.
The Ending
Gabe defeats Yulaw in the final fight and the Multiverse Authority arrests him.
The agents take Yulaw to the Hell Universe, a prison universe where lawbreakers are sent. Yulaw discovers that the prison universe works under high gravity. Every prisoner has to fight constantly to survive. The film closes with Yulaw being thrown into the prison yard and immediately attacked. The audience watches him survive the first wave of attackers and prepare for the next.
Gabe returns to our universe. The Multiverse Authority offers him recruitment because he’s now the only surviving alternate. That makes him “The One” by the rules of the mechanic. The agents have decided to use his capability instead of oppose it. Gabe accepts the recruitment offer at the funeral for T.K. The film closes with him beginning the journey across the universes.
The ending leaves the door open for a sequel that never happened. The setup is clean. Gabe is operating as the most powerful being in the multiverse with institutional backing. Yulaw is alive in a prison universe with motivation to escape. The conflict can be revisited at any point. The sequel didn’t develop because The One’s commercial performance was disappointing relative to expectations. Sony had hoped for franchise-level returns. The film made approximately $73 million worldwide against an $80 million budget. The numbers didn’t support continuation.
Craft: An Underrated Achievement
Craft Note
Across multiple departments, The One works at peak. The Jet Li dual performance dominates the film. The supporting work from Jason Statham, Carla Gugino, and Delroy Lindo grounds the high concept. The James Wong direction handles the action and dramatic material with consistent professionalism. The Corey Yuen choreography integrates Hong Kong technique with Hollywood production. The parallel universe premise generates dramatic situations through character constraint instead of through world-building.
The release timing buried the film. November 2001 was approximately eight weeks after September 11. American audiences weren’t in a mood for action films featuring rogue agents and institutional pursuit. The Hollywood action production cycle had been disrupted. The One landed in a market that couldn’t properly evaluate it. The later reevaluation has been slow because the film never had a champion arguing for it.
The 9 rating is what it earns across multiple viewings.
The film holds up because the high-concept premise generates the dramatic situations instead of just providing a backdrop. The action sequences integrate the dual performance work cleanly. The supporting performances are stronger than the contemporary critical reception suggested. The One belongs in any serious conversation about parallel universe action cinema.
Is The One as good as people say?
A 9, and I’d hand it to anybody who thinks they’re sick of multiverse stories. Jet Li playing two versions of the same man with two different bodies makes the film, Corey Yuen’s fights still hit hard, and Gugino makes T.K. matter enough that Gabe’s rage feels earned. The only thing keeping it from a 10 for me is how little the film does with Statham, and I think it deserves far more attention than its release date ever let it get.
