Colson Baker, better known as Machine Gun Kelly, advances his acting career with One Way (), a low-budget, almost-single-location crime drama in which he portrays a small-time criminal who spends the majority of its 90-minute running time slowly bleeding to death on a bus. Sounds wonderfully EXCITING, wouldn’t you say? MGK’s screen career highlights include portraying Tommy Lee in The Dirt, being 10th-billed in Bird Box, meeting current girlfriend Megan Fox while filming Midnight in the Switchgrass, and co-directing and starring in the stoner comedy Good Mourning – and possibly One Way, which has us wondering if he can resist the temptation to quote Mr. Orange for the duration of the film: I’M F—IN’ DYING HERE! Does he convincingly portray a man who is croaking from a traditional stomach shot? Let’s find out.
ONE WAY: TO STREAM OR NOT TO STREAM?
The Essentials: DREA DE MATTO BLINKS IN SLOW MOTION, a crucial action. While her eyelids slowly open and close and reopen, Freddy (MGK) runs away from her really quickly. She portrays Vic, an intimidating thug. She desires that Freddy’s head be severed. He just stole cocaine and a half-million dollars from her. He performed an atrocious act of treachery against her confidence. His full-panic scurry and slackjaw/stupid hairstyle combination evokes Spud from Trainspotting. He avoids the cops and makes it to the bus stop, where he purchases a ticket and boards. The bus driver (Thomas Francis Murphy) seems unconcerned that a sweaty, untidy man with questionable carry-on luggage, a limp, and a tense, shifty appearance has boarded the vehicle. However, this is Florida, so one can guess that nearly half of his passengers are similarly attired.
Our courageous driver also fails to see that the passenger is bleeding profusely across the bus. Freddy reaches into his jacket and removes a hand smeared in the crimson substance. He was shot, and the bullet is still inside him, poisoning his organs. He is writhing and grimacing. Too often, he approaches passing out. Sometimes he has hallucinations in which he sees himself as tall, powerful, and healthy, with his hair nicely groomed, telling himself not to give up. He instructs his shady associate JJ (Luis Da Silva) to rush to the next station to pick him up. He calls his ex/baby mama, Christina (Meagan Holder), an ER nurse who may be able to help him, but she hangs up on him because he’s a scumbag, and also because she’s answering her phone at the same time she’s hurriedly wheeling some poor suffering patient down the corridor while other medical personnel shout 30 CCS OF (medication name here) STAT and other hospital cliches. Not the best time to receive a call on a burner phone from an unknown number, Christina.
Freddy is obviously not the only passenger on the bus. A pregnant woman is seen traveling alone in the sky. Back there, two Black males are observing him with suspicion. Rachel (Storm Reid) in the row ahead does not appear to notice that Freddy is moaning and bleeding and that his hands and phone are covered in blood when she requests to borrow his phone. Why? She desires to send a text message to the “Smokie” man she is traveling to meet. And thus Freddy’s conscience is ignited: In flashbacks, we see his estranged daughter, and Rachel certainly reminds him of her. Rachel is younger than she claims to be, and she is dangerously close to falling into the grips of a predator. In the meantime, JJ’s situation deteriorates, so he scrolls through his contacts to “ASSHOLE” and phones his father (Kevin Bacon! ), who is a true piece of work. In the meantime, another passenger, Will (Travis Fimmel), joins the plane. He appears to be a pleasant person with his brown shoes and beard, but we all know better, don’t we? This is Florida, where nobody boards a nighttime liner soaked in flickering and/or red lighting in the midst of a pounding rainstorm unless their goal is hardship, tragedy, or difficulty.
One Way resembles Reservoir Dogs and the Safdies’ we’re-here declaration Good Time, with elements of the wow-he’s-making-a-lot-of-phone-calls-isms from the extremely tense all-talk/no-action thriller Locke.
Performance Worth Observing: Nobody is going to give MGK an Oscar any time soon, but he isn’t half awful here, especially after his character’s purpose for stealing the goods is revealed, proving he isn’t a heartless soul in a heartless world.
Memorable Dialogue: Florida bus driver deserves a raise: “Every day I deal with degenerates like you!”
Skin and Sexuality: None.
He evidently does not care that Freddy is leaving bloody handprints on his bus, despite the fact that he routinely interacts with such degenerates. Call a cop or an ambulance, Mr. Bus Driver Man! There are times to be quiet and mind your own business, and moments to interfere, and now is the time to interfere! Sure appears like a matter of life or death! But if he did, he’d get in the way of the plot, which contrives to provide wicked-cruel twists and moments of incredible illogic, and he’d get in the way of the budget, which doesn’t want to add any extraneous, non-descript places to the production’s rather limited constraints.
However, One Way functions nearly acceptably well within its just too evident restrictions, and please note my restrained tone. Director Andrew Baird compensates for the film’s direct-to-VOD modesty with an abundance of conspicuous lighting and shaky-cam closeups, giving it a pseudo-artsiness that attempts to replicate the Safdie Brothers’ visual acumen through intensity, nerve-wracking suspense, and sleazy, dangerous late-night vibes. The script is more talk than action, with dull dialogue, shallow characters, and a cliched criminal-finds-his-conscience-before-he-was-bleeding-to-death plot.
So it’s not about nothing, necessarily, which is something, but is it enough? MGK’s painful slow-death teeth-clenching and internal moral grappling become tiresome by the midway mark, despite Kevin Bacon’s appearance to turn over a large family-dysfunction rock and bolster the plot with a little handlebar-mustache nastiness. Nobody will accuse One Way of being anything more than a genre exercise with the occasional convincing performance from MGK, but when the rubber meets the road, it fails to provide viscerally or psychologically gratifying results.
Our Call: MGK’s One Way is basically an adequate vehicle. It has a few good moments, but you should eventually AVOID IT.
John Serba is a film reviewer and freelance writer from Grand Rapids, Michigan. More of his art can be seen at johnserbaatlarge.com.
»‘One Way’ on Hulu is a Machine Gun Kelly vehicle that places him on a bus while he bleeds to death«