Director James Nunn and frequent leading man Scott Adkins are back together again with One Last Shot, the (presumably) final entry in their elaborately staged, single-take tactical action trilogy. It’s difficult to convey just how hard these guys work: this is Nunn’s sixth film in three years, while Adkins has already starred in three films this year (with two more still on the way). For all the pleasures of the DTV genre, there’s a lot of effort going on in front of and behind the camera — this is blood, sweat, and tears cinema. Whatever its flaws, you can really feel the exertion up on the screen. In a recent interview with Jordan Crucchiola for The Action Desk, Nunn is surprisingly candid about the economics of making these sorts of films, and how sequels are expected to be bigger and better even as the budgets shrink. This is part of the reason why this series’ long, single take approach has always come across as charming rather than bombastic or gimmicky. It’s one thing for a studio picture with unlimited resources to show off with elaborate, digitally sutured oners, but it’s entirely another to punch above one’s weight class with little but talent and ingenuity. This scrappy One Shot series does so much with so little, and winds up becoming, essentially, a kind of documentary of its own making.
If the original One Shot could be loosely categorized as a siege film, One More Shot expanded the scope of the series and ran rampant all over a huge airport structure. One Last Shot narrows in focus (likely a result of the budgetary restraints that Nunn admits to), but compensates by emphasizing more elaborate staging and serpentine camera work in the process. When we last left Adkins’ resourceful Navy Seal Jake Harris, he had just foiled a plot to detonate a dirty bomb in Washington, D.C. during the State of the Union address. Bad guys defeated, an exhausted, wounded Harris is ready to go home to his family. One Last Shot picks up immediately in the aftermath, quickly revealing that the actual plan was to forcibly gain access to the biometric data of the heads of the NSA and Department of Defense in an effort to seize control of the entire American strategic defense network. A group of mercenaries kidnap an NSA deputy secretary, the last person they need to complete their plot, and suddenly Harris is yanked back into action, ordered to join up with a rescue team to go in and get her back. But there’s a catch: the actual big bad pulling all the strings is a disgruntled SEAL, Carter (Steven Cree), and he’s got history with Harris. Living legend Dolph Lundgren pops in for a cameo and orders Harris to take out Carter once they’ve secured the hostage. It wouldn’t look good for a domestic terrorist attack to be spearheaded by a decorated war veteran, and certainly not one who knows all sorts of dirty secrets about America’s foreign misadventures. But Harris is skeptical; he’s a soldier, not an assassin, and Carter even saved his life once.Orders are orders, however, and soon Harris and a squad of men are sneaking through wooded areas to assault the manor where Carter, his men, and the hostage are all holed up.
In an essay some years back on director John Hyams, critic and action specialist Jonah Jeng wrote that “Hyam’s films are not action movies that happen to have some interesting ideas, but films in which the ideas emerge through the action.” What Nunn, Adkins, long-time action chorepgrapher Tim Mann, and stunt coordinator Dan Styles do here is similar. The “gimmick” of the long take isn’t just applied to the material, cut-and-paste style, but instead the entire conception of the story and choreography has been built from the ground up to accentuate the contours of the aesthetic. Like the first two films, the limitations of the single-take approach are most apparent in the early goings, when traditional editing would allow the filmmakers to cut quickly between characters and settings (there’s a funny bit here where Nunn “cheats” and simply zooms in on a digital screen and then back out of another screen at another location). Harris and the rescue team move on the manor essentially in real time, accessing tunnels and diffusing trip wire bombs before finally gaining access to the housing structure. The first big set piece finally kicks in, and Nunn expertly choreographs a complex network of multiple bodies occupying two floors of the structure, wherein something like a dozen men point guns at each other while someone tries desperately to disarm an IED. It’s reminiscent of the shower room infiltration sequence in Michael Bay’s The Rock, and like that film, much of the team doesn’t make it out alive.
At this point, the film has set up its story, all the players, and the stakes, and is free to switch into all-out action mode. It’s pretty thrilling to watch Adkins navigate various hallways and rooms, the mobile camera following him through cramped corridors but then pulling back into a wide shot to more adequately display the various hand-to-hand battles. Main bad guy Carter isn’t much of a fighter, but thankfully his lead henchman is played by the great Kane Kosugi, and he and Adkins have not one but two fantastic fights. Adkins has gotten older, and if he’s not moving quite like he was in the Undisputed or Ninja series, the One Shot trilogy still displays his unique mixture of brawn and athleticism. Nunn remains the ideal collaborator, one who inutitvely understands when to push in tight to accentuate the impact of bullets, but also when to step back and let the choreography play out unitenrrupted. There’s nothing else out there quite like the One Shot series, and while it’s probably best to let it end here, one wouldn’t be too mad if they felt like taking one more at One Shot.
DIRECTOR: James Nunn; CAST: Scott Adkins, Steven Cree, Hannah Ware, Dolph Lundgren, Kane Kosugi, Neil Linpow; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures; STREAMING: September 22; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 38 min.
Comments are closed.