One Ranger

The idea is outlandishly stupid, but has potential for a fun fish out of water film.

Thomas Jane plays a caricature of a texas ranger straight out of a western movie. He comes across an international terrorist robbing banks in Texas for some stupid reason and is then recruited by "British Intelligence" as they call it in the film to track and identify him in london.

The terrorist plans to set off some nuclear device or something stupid like that, aided by some Russian gangsters, Islamic terrorists and an assortment of other stereotypes.

What sounds like the setup to a fun Beverly Hills Cop style fish out of water action comedy ends up being a bore, with most of the jokes falling flat, Thomas Jane and his British female partner having zero chemistry, and the villains turning into a joke as the movie goes on.

John Malkovich is in it for an easy payday as a British Agent, doing his best impression of the old microsoft windows text to speech robot voice, whilenot even hiding his American accent.

The opening scene is pretty good with Thomas Jane tracking down a drunk Indian horse thief for some petty crimes and being a hardass about it.

From there on it's just downhill.

Thomas Jane has zero character development throughout the movie. He never grows. They do nothing with the fish out of water scenario. No character development for his female partner as well. They remain static cardboard cutouts. The whole cultural aspect is never really played with, probably for fear of offending people with stereotypes.

Structurally, the film is an absolute mess. The entire London plot goes nowhere and the finale takes place in the Texas desert again, just where the story started. This renders the entire London part, the center of the movie, superfluous. You don't send your hero on a globe trotting adventure only to end up where he started.

There is a fight with Thomas Jane and an oversized muscular Russian gangster again. Three of them actually. They utilize all kinds of household items and kitchenware again. This could have been a great callback to the fight scene in Punisher. However, they lack humor here. The violence and amount of damage each character takes is equally ridiculous here, but lacking the opera music and likeable side characters from Punisher, it just comes off as uninspired here.

Also, if you're going to have 3 fights against the same villain, there should be some character development. Maybe the villain could have gained some respect for Jane's character over their encounters. He had no real reason to follow the main villain. He was a mercenary.

So much wasted potential.

Also, how cheap do you have to be to use digital blood instead of squibs? Oftentimes the bullet wounds look like low resolution overlays. They aren't even always tracked right, which tells me they had some underpaid kid there adding them in on after effects. Thomas Jane coproduced this. How can you produce your own star vehicle like this, and then mess something as simple as squibs in an action film?

Very disappointing.

All that being said, I generally enjoy seeing Thomas Jane on screen. He lost his leading man flair, but he's still good. A shame he joined the dollar bin direct to video crew like Liam Neeson, Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson and others. This film wasted a good idea with a bad screenwriter and poor direction, though given the budget, I don't want to place too much blame on the director. Still, he put his name on it and not Alan Smithee. Should have had more pride in his work.

This shows why not to make a movie from the first draft. If the writers had done a little work on this, it could have been quite good. I don't know how Texas Rangers dress, nor do I care. MI-6 enlists him to help catch or kill a terrorist who's planning mass destruction in London. The terrorist is of course Irish, his main henchman is a Russian who is nearly indestructible. The fights he has with the ranger are ridiculously over the top. And repetitive. The ranger constantly, and without for the most part, his own gun, blasts heavily armed terrorists away again and again. Malkovich, for the first time in any role, sleep walks through this. Guess he needed a few bucks. Direction is pedestrian. This could have been so much better.

So, fair disclaimer ahead of time, I'm a pretty big fan of most of Thomas Jane's stuff. He's had some great roles that I really enjoyed, and I hoped that this movie would be another chance for him to shine.

Unfortunately, it really wasn't a chance for anyone to shine at all, not even John Malkovich.

Not exactly sure what I expected, I guess I just expected a decent action movie with a Texas Ranger chasing after a criminal. You know, normal stuff. What we got was a weird knock-off of Walker Texas Ranger with a bad script, acceptable fight scenes, and a lot of cliché lines that didn't fit the movie at all. It's like an AI took a bunch of segments from a handful of the most popular action movies and just slapped it all together to create this .... I'm not even sure what to call it. It's just a bunch of oddly disconnected scenes that don't make a lot of sense and are stitched together.

I would also like to point out how ridiculous the gun-play was. Because after realizing half-way through that the story was a bust, I thought maybe things can be somewhat redeemed with a few good gun battles. However, the directors of this movie clearly decided to roll with an emphasis on flashy, and completely ignore believable. There are several scenes where dozens of rounds are fired from handguns that can only hold half that amount. Rifles are given to the main characters from "tactical/strike teams" without sights. Rocket launchers are used on people like it's some kind of video game. Characters using machine guns one-handed, as if recoil doesn't exist and physics don't matter. It's like watching a bargain-bin 80's action movie from the local dollar store, but without the charm, awesome hairstyles, cool cars, and mirrored aviators worn by the main character.

Anyhow, I'm done wasting my time with this review, already wasted far too much time watching this movie. Swing, and a miss. Better luck next time, Thomas Jane.

I can't decide which character was the most annoying and irritating, Thomas Jane with this phony cowboy accent faking a deep Sam Elliott tone trying to emulate Clint Eastwood, Dominique Tipper with her accent and entire character unconvincing, or John Malkovich speaking so slow and slurred like he was drunk in every scene. Just one of those characters are enough to make watching this film irritating, but having to put up with all three throughout the entire 95 min runtime was unbearable. The only convincing and entertaining characters were Dean Jagger and Jess Liaudin.

Then there's the predicable, convoluted, logic-defying and plot-hole riddled screenplay that has so much happening in the normally comfortable 95 min runtime, the irritating characters and slow pacing made everything that was happening oddly boring and uninteresting. The narrative and dialog was just a lot of nonsense, filler, with very little substance. I get that this was a low budget B film, but it was just a bunch of cliched narratives thrown all together to try and make an interesting story, and it failed. Maybe I would've enjoyed it a little more with less annoying and cliched characters, but as it was, it was painful to watch. Sure there were a few decent action scenes, but that's it.

And here is the paradox. If you are old enough to remember when Tom Jane was a hot-ticket A-lister, ditto for John Malkovich, then unfortunately you are also old enough to remember when both Dennis Weaver and Clint Eastwood did this same story (the former on TV, the latter in a feature), and did it much better. Just about every aspect of the production is weak, but most especially the writing and the editing. Director Johnson, best known for his completely forgettable "B" action flicks, does absolutely nothing to raise his reputation. In fact, ONE RANGER violates one of the "commandments" of film-making, which is to never make the villain more interesting than the hero. ((Designated "IMDb Top Reviewer." Please check out my list "167+ Nearly-Perfect Movies (with the occasional Anime or TV miniseries) you can/should see again and again (1932 to the present))