There's so much in the media about the success of offbeat independent films that it's easy to forget that there are some really dreadful ones out there. For every Blair Witch Project or Clerks, there are at least two or three that follow some ill-advised notion of what an indie film should be. And these are the films that - with their bland formulas and their self-absorbed "style" - make me want to cringe. An example of this is One, which is part of the otherwise exemplary Shooting Gallery Film Series. Writer/director Tony Barbieri obviously imagines himself to be quite the auteur, but "amateur" was the word that kept running through my mind.

Jason Cairns and Kane Picoy star in the independent drama One |
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There's an archetypal plot to bad indie films, and One digs it out of the closet yet again. At the start, Charlie (Jason Cairns) is released from prison. Waiting to pick him up is his lifelong best friend Nick (Kane Picoy), a once-promising baseball star who threw his career away and now sits on a bar stool most of the time. Charlie has learned his lesson from prison and wants to begin a new life. But - surprise, surprise - Nick undermines every attempt he makes at improving himself. The two friends are now going down different paths - one for the better, one for the worse. Later on, we find out that a part of Charlie's dark past is coming back to find him. Well, of course it is.
Charlie gets an honest job, but screws up and gets fired. He also begins a cliched and, frankly, rather dull relationship with his boss, a pretty do-gooder named Sara (Autumn Macintosh). Nick, meanwhile, continues to stand on the sidelines mocking his friend and blowing his own opportunities. Everything leads up to the moment when the past catches up to Charlie. If you've ever seen a bad indie film, you'll figure out what's going to happen long before it actually does.
One is frustrating for so many reasons. We'll start with the acting, which is more wooden than a log cabin. Cairns and Picoy both engage in an annoying sort of monotone mumbling, as if their dialogue will sound more convincing the harder it is to understand. Neither actor bothers with things like inflection; maybe they felt it would damage their indie credibility to show some enthusiasm.
Then there's the direction, which is self-consciously show-offish. Barbieri repeatedly uses the annoying device of shooting his subjects from another room so that there's always a door frame partially blocking our view. There's no rationale for this, nor for the fact that it's used probably a half dozen times. It's just an act of pomposity. I might have overlooked it had One been more quickly paced. The story drags on endlessly, despite the fact that we know everything that's going to happen in the first five minutes. I kept wanting to yell at the director to get on with it already. I think Barbieri was too in love with his own material, rendering him unable to made judgements about the quality of the writing and the pace of the plot.
Worst of all is the abrupt ending. I don't want to give it away, but it amounts to a shot of a character sitting and thinking about what has just happened in the movie. That could conceivably be a poignant ending to a better film, but to this one, it's just meaningless. The point is that the story's occurrences force the character to ponder life's meaning; for it to have any resonance in this case, we would have to see what conclusions he reaches. And that doesn't happen. The ending doesn't follow through or show how the situation affects the character. Barbieri is too lazy to really explore how change comes about so he serves up this fumble of a conclusion.
This movie's title is actually quite symbolic: the characters are one dimensional and the plot is one-note. In accordance, I am giving this sad, pathetic little movie one star.
(
out of four)
One is unrated but contains adult language and situations . The running time is 1 hour and 25 minutes.