Finally, the man from the EE adverts and a horrific quality musician have come together for a father-and-son car crash action movie. One Way is going in one, obvious direction. Down. Down into the annals of action filler stereotyping that has plagued the possibility of quality when bigger-name artists are attracted to them. Kevin Bacon is the latest fabled legend of the screen to fall for these misfirings, and he brings Machine Gun Kelly into the fold along with him. Kelly is becoming a marker for poor-quality features. He serves his purpose just as well here as he did for the Bruce Willis and Megan Fox-helmed Midnight in the Switchgrass. His finest role, being slapped into a pool via a giant hand with the Jackass crew, is already long behind him. It feels like it, anyway.
Garish red and white text appears and cuts the high-paced, laughable attempt at providing intensity in the process of buying a bus ticket. Much of that is done with a poor interjection from Kelly, who huffs, grunts and sweats his way through the knackering process of buying a ticket to a nearly departed bus. It gets no better from there. Little details are the killer for pieces like this because the actual core of One Way is nowhere near interesting enough to hold the attention of anyone sane. A one-way ticket. Get it? Absolutely banal moments and messages are frequent in the anxiety-riddled lead performance of a musician that thinks he can act.
Flashing lights aboard a bus that begins to look like that of the dingy Trainspotting trip to London more than the action thriller One Way tries and fails to be. Kelly is as awful as he is out of place as the leading man of a feature that hopes to extract ferocity and interest from those happenstance encounters aboard a bus ride. Because so much of the feature depends on the bus and the antics that go on outside of it having an impact on Freddy (Kelly), almost all of the narrative, the context and the outcome, depends on his lead performance. It is barely strong enough to mark a brief line of dialogue, let alone a leading role that sees him share the screen with Bacon and Storm Reid. At least Bacon and Reid get along with the process, know what sort of feature Andrew Baird has in store for them and push on through.
Bustling with the implication of action instead of the act itself, One Way is a filler-clad piece that relies on chit-chat focused on with extreme close-ups. Thrillers should be, well, thrilling. One Way is nothing close to that. A dud note here, a collection of blood and anguish there, it all boils down to the simplicity of the crime-clad action genre that runs closer and closer to insufferable. Baird is very proud of his title gag. One Way does exactly that, providing its character with one way out, a one-way bus ticket, one way of reneging on promises of old. It also has one way of demonstrating that, repeatedly, with little differentiation between the grim and the great. One Way has much more of the former than that of the latter.
