THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

Part sci-fi, part kung fu, and not especially good at being either. The One at least earns a point or two for its inventive premise. Jet Li plays a former agent for the Multiverse Authority, an interdimensional policing outfit created to prevent exactly what this agent goes rogue and starts doing: traveling to parallel universes and hunting down alternate versions of himself. The logic goes that with every “self” he kills, the remaining versions grow stronger. Every one of us, whether we know it or not, has 124 duplicates. Why 124, exactly? I didn’t ask. But if you kill ’em all, you become godlike. Narcissism as interdimensional bloodsport.

Of course, that means his final boss is also himself—the version living in our own universe. A mild-mannered LAPD officer named Gabe Law (good thing for us, I guess, that his last name wasn’t “Outlaw”). Gabe has top-notch martial arts skills but roughly the screen presence of a potted fern. The climactic fight—Jet Li versus Jet Li—is certainly amusing in a video-gamey way, and it’s a well-executed visual gimmick. Even so, there was a missed opportunity in having the good Jet Li repeatedly ask his foe, “Why are you hitting yourself?” after suffering each new blow.

There are some chuckles in the montage of alternate Jet Lis (one wears a goatee, naturally). But none of the characters—including our supposed hero—leave strong enough impressions for us to care about the stakes. Even fellow Multiverse Authority agents Jason Statham and Delroy Lindo, usually reliable scene-stealers, are stuck with exposition. Their job mainly to clench their jaws, grimly explaining the plot, while the action erupts in their periphery.

Li is a gifted physical performer but not much of a dramatic anchor. That wouldn’t have mattered so much if the film had played a bit harder into the gimmickry of its own premise. Still, there’s some fun to be had here. Particularly if you enjoy watching the laws of physics get tossed brazenly aside for the sake of a slow-mo spinning kick or two. But for a movie about 124 different versions of yourself, The One feels peculiarly short on personality.

It starts with a Cheshire grin and disheveled hair—features belonging to McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) as he strolls into a psychiatric ward with the look of someone who knows something nobody else does. That he isn’t really crazy. That he’s faking it. He thinks a stint in the mental ward means a vacation from responsibility—or at least it’ll spare him the labor camps. What he doesn’t count on is hell itself having fluorescent lighting. Or being run by Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), a soft-spoken devil with the personality of a metronome and the empathy of a traffic light.

What should’ve been an easy con turns into a slow-motion wrestling match with the unbudging force that is Ratched. Fletcher—who won a Best Actress Academy Award—plays her as brilliantly infuriating, but also maddeningly polite. Ratched isn’t just monstrous. She’s worse. If you raise a concern, no matter how legitimate it is, she’ll have you apologizing before you finish your sentence.

McMurphy himself isn’t noble. But he’s a charming screw-up. He has no plan beyond having a laugh and maybe rattling the cage for kicks. But then he starts to see it, and it starts to bug him. Something unsettling in the other inmates. They’re like ghosts in slippers, drifting through the day sedated and small. And suddenly, his trouble stops being mischief. It becomes something more like revolt. But McMurphy’s rebellion is ultimately half-baked, playing against Ratched’s soft-spoken control like a moth banging futilely against glass.

Forman keeps the moralizing out. This isn’t a sermon on psychiatry or an evisceration of institutional cruelty. Although this movie is bound to rile up at least something inside you—that is, if you have a sense of justice. This is more of a human story—about one unstoppable fool colliding with an unmovable bureaucracy. McMurphy succeeds for a while. He stirs the other men awake for a time. But eventually, the machine remembers to grind them back down.