One Way (I) (2022)
6/10
A mixed bag of lost opportunities, amongst the stellar performances by Baker, Reid, Bacon and Fimmel.
2 September 2022
Ngl, MGK, has earned my respect as an actor in this film. He literally held his own alongside icons Kevin Bacon and Travis Fimmel. For that matter, all casting and performances were convincing and excellent, especially Storm Reid and Luis Da Silva Jr., with only Drea de Matteo being too cliched and unconvincing as the gang leader.

Even the score for a low budget B film was on point. The cinematography however, had some issues, specifically being too dark in most of the bus scenes, and the garbled out of focus and shaky cam shots. Although a creative conceptual story with some decent twists, the writing suffered some plot and technical issues, and had too much filler for the little substance to effectively fill in the slowly paced 95 min runtime. The story had decent continuity, but also had some convoluted scenes and dialog. The ending was confusing; was it trying to be smart, or was it just convoluted. Even the constant conversations with Freddy's "conscience(?)" felt amateurish and out of place, and the cheesy directing and slow-mo and blurred shots got annoying pretty quick.

This film needed more dramatic and suspenseful content and/or a shorter runtime. All the filler added in just dragged out the film and should've been edited out, and perhaps add more needed character background and development. It's too bad this film has so many rookie-filmmaker mistakes, because with the awesome casting and performances and great conceptual story, it easily had the potential to be a great thriller. Still, a well deserved 6/10 from me for Baker's impressive performance next to two great actors.
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