Occasionally something enters the streaming/DTV action space that genuinely merits curiosity, even when the project doesn’t quite live up to its potential. Marking a perfect example is the new film(s) One Mile: Chapter One and the cleverly titled One Mile: Chapter Two. Conceived and produced concurrently as a movie and sequel but released simultaneously, the duology is an interesting experiment that ultimately proves more successful as an intrepid low-budget production than as an action movie (or two).
Chapter One introduces us to Danny Beckett (Ryan Phillippe), an ex-special forces operator. Only recently retired, he wants to reconnect with his estranged wife (Sara Canning) and teen daughter Alex (Amelie Hoeferle), so he jumps at the chance to take the girl on a road trip to visit prospective colleges. Obviously, their strained relationship will be further tested by a series of unfortunate upcoming events, and those arrive in the form of a bunch of creepy, off-grid hill folk attempting to abduct Alex and force her to live in their compound as breeding stock (big yikes), as all of “their women” have been poisoned by contaminated water and can no longer bear healthy children. This conclave of psychos is led by one Stanley Dixon (C. Thomas Howell), who holds a cultish sway over his people.
Without spoiling too much, Chapter One largely operates as a survival thriller, with Danny using his special set of skills to protect his daughter and kill a bunch of the bad guys. Chapter Two picks up some months later, with Dixon returning to recapture Alex and force Danny to confront him in an attempt to rescue her. It follows, then, that both One Miles are peppered with some solid action, especially in the many fights between Danny and an assemblage of much larger dudes in Chapter One. These sequences are also laced with some nice Jack Bauer-esque brutality (especially in a memorable torture sequence in the second film). The formal chops in service of this action and which see the larger project through are perfectly adequate, if nothing spectacular.
But things take a bit of an unfortunate turn narratively in Chapter Two. A lot of credit is due here to the production for making the most of a large set across both movies and delivering some genuinely good location work, but the script has to twist itself into quite a few storytelling knots to justify getting Danny back there, unassisted. It also ends up offering a bevy of unanswered questions about just how an entire community of hundreds of people willfully go along with a sex trafficking operation that has also apparently generated no suspicion, despite its victims all being poached from the same spot. Characters ostensibly in dire jeopardy waltz in and out of the plot pretty casually, and of course make terrible strategic decisions when given the opportunity. Ultimately, none of those things are fatal to film(s), but when taking both entries in (with the total runtime coming in under three hours), the strain becomes quite evident in the back half. Taken together, however, both parts of One Mile present an interesting model going forward, and the overarching project’s relative success in producing two perfectly adequate low-budget thrillers unlocks an avenue of creativity heretofore untraveled in the DTV world and should make for some future projects worth catching.
DIRECTOR: Adam Davidson; CAST: Ryan Phillippe, C. Thomas Howell, Amélie Hoeferle, Sage Linder; DISTRIBUTOR: Republic Pictures; STREAMING: February 20; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 46 min.
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