12 Terrible Movies That Blew Awesome Concepts

3. The One

The Pitch

You can just imagine writer-director James Wong (Final Destination) pitching this movie to Columbia Pictures as "Jet Li's Highlander", because it's honestly one hell of a hook.

The One casts Li as a rogue inter-dimensional police officer who decides to visit all 124 parallel dimensions and kill every alternate version of himself, gaining power with each one he kills.

His ultimate goal? To be the final version of himself left standing, which would bestow him with God-like abilities, all while the authorities (led by Jason Statham) try to take him into custody.

What Went Wrong

Where to begin? The One is a casualty of the post-Matrix boom, where every sci-fi action flick wanted to be a mind-bending, CGI-fuelled martial arts extravaganza in the pursuit of epic box office receipts.

And though it arguably works as ironically entertaining garbage, the film ultimately fails to make the most of its Jet Li vs. Jet Li premise, serving up wonky, technically rough action set to hilariously inappropriate nu-metal music (it is an early-2000s action flick, after all).

Oh, and Jason Statham has hair, which is just inherently offputting.

The script is, obviously, braindead, and given how efficiently Wong delivered easy thrills with Final Destination, the lack of compelling lore and world-building are both extremely dispiriting here.

If there's any movie that should've been sculpted around tightly choreographed fight scenes, it's surely this, and yet The One is visually ugly, badly acted and only fleetingly amusing in the most accidental sense.