movies here at the FCU. As expected,
this switch of teams has pitted Carver and Andreev against
each other, and it does seem a little lopsided since Andreev
has about ten inches and ninety pounds of Carver, but he's a
tough little dude.
Also while all of this is going on, for whatever reason,
Carver is semi-stalking Janice (Claudia Bassols) the very
pretty club manager. Apparently Ray killed her dad
during one his assignments when she was a little girl, in her
plain sight, and Ray has taken it upon himself to look out for
her ever since from the shadows. We could mention that
Janice looks to be about thirty and Carver looks around thirty
five which would've made him a sixteen year old hitman at the
time from our simple math, but you already know by now that we
roll with these things. We could also mention that since
Janice is a pretty girl with no defense skills in the middle
of an action movie and as such she will invariably be
kidnapped, and that it's Carver's fault that she's in danger
in the first place, be we won't mention that either.
Regardless, Carver has to get the girl back and kill a bunch
of faceless Eastern European cats in the process.
Aleksey… well… that's also a little odd path this movie took
in regards to this character, but it might yield more action
movies and while we weren't crazy about this one, we'd
certainly watch these other movies if they did happen.
First off we'd like to offer up a moment of silence for the
faceless Eastern European henchman. Ever since these
cheap action movies moved over to Romania and Bulgaria,
thousands upon thousands of Eastern European henchmen have
been mercilessly mowed down via various instruments of
death. Rest in Peace Faceless Eastern European
Henchman.
As far as 'One in the Chamber' itself goes, we have a solid
collection of Cuba Gooding Jr. sleepwalking while looking
depressed, Dolph chewing up scenery while occasionally using
his Ivan Drago Russian accent, some solid action sequences
featuring the afore mentioned Faceless Eastern European
Henchmen meeting untimely ends, and a bit of misplaced
melodrama. I mean I like a pretty girl in a movie as
much as the next guy, but this pretty girl seemed shoehorned
into this movie for the sole purpose of getting kidnapped and
the whole exercise didn't feel organic.
I used the word organic in a sentence.
Admittedly 'One in the Chamber' seemed to be designed as a
more muted action thriller than say the completely over the
top 'Sinners and Saints' with its washed out color palette, a
more depressed than usual Cuba and its deliberate pacing and I
guess this approach kind of works if this is what one is
looking for in an action movie but from where I was sitting
this erratic pacing kept the audience at arms length, keeping
us from getting swept up into what should've been some purely
enjoyable madness and chaos.
Still, 'One in the Chamber' was better than average as far as
these types of movies go. The action was solid, the
scrap between Dolph and Cuba was impressively staged, Dolph
seemed to be having a good time in this one as he almost
always seems to be in his more recent endeavors… even though
he's still not much of an actor… but we love the guy, and
while the narrative was your typical pure utter plot hole
ridden nonsense it did keep the movie on track.
Again, we probably expected a little more from team Kaufman
considering his past exploits, but 'One in the Chamber' was
still adequate if not marginal entertainment.
