Thomas Jane brandishes weaponry and speaks with a Southern accent while pursuing terrorists in a new action film across the pond. One Texas ranger is a rugged cowboy hat wearing lawman with his brass belt buckle always in place to show the bumbling Brits how to arrest criminals on their own soil. The whole movie beginning full of action in the desert ends up being nothing as it never comes close in reaching that high bar again. A scatterbrained plot, replete with characters not well developed, abets logic gaps or inconsistencies that prevent its comprehension from taking hold. Added to that, there is no connection between the two of them.
Texas Ranger Alex Tyree (Jane), while in Laredo flats, has caught Tom sleeping (Gregory Zarogaza). He gives him two choices- he can either go peacefully with handcuffs or as a carcass. Alert! An alert sounds on Alex’s radio. Three officers have been shot by bank robbers who are fleeing towards Mexico.
Alex sees a dune buggy speeding through the sand with deputies chasing behind it. Declan McBride (Dean Jagger) jumps out and mows down cops with bullets flying everywhere. Alex aims for hundreds of yards away and cocks the rifle which results into disabling of dune buggy anyhow. His accomplices know what will happen next after feeling steel from his rifle’s barrel first hand. On his way to the border though, Declan realizes how far rangers could reach him.
The Federales hands Declan over to Alex at point blank range only for them both being captured soon after by KGB agents; he wakes up strapped down at Tony Starks%u2019 mansion after surviving an almost fatal ambush from Tony Stark himself; Dominique Tipper plays MI6 agent Jennifer Smith who provides her wounded partner with information about Declan’s background; this terrorist has been stealing for some unknown reason; British intelligence thinks Declan is back in London; Alex is the only one who saw Declan or interacted with him; she asks him to help her find Declan formally; Alex is yearning for revenge after his colleagues are murdered, there is no way to know what else he has planned.
One Ranger portrays the vaunted British security apparatus as inept fools. A hard Texan guy is needed by MI6 to finish the game they had been playing on Declan all along. The sheer presumptuousness of this idea is laughable. Warning from Agent Geddes (John Malkovich) a MI6 Control that he is just an American observer and cannot use a gun while in foreign soil, which rule was broken immediately after bullets start flying. Little sense can be made of scenes showing Smith and Alex extorting information from London informers- why does she need him? What does Alex bring into this that aids the search? This question never arises making a joke out of Act Two.
Throughout the film Smith and Alex repeatedly run into each other Oleg Jakovenko (Jess Liaudin). That tattooed brawny thug who served time with Declan keeps popping up like a mad groundhog whenever least expected by both Smith and Tyree throughout the movie again and again. Mano-a-mano battles happen over and over between them too. Who needs guns when you can fight each other’s brains out? These fights serve no purpose but filling up space before it moves on. It’s also obvious that filmmakers didn’t think of Declan as being scary or serious threat either. Undoubtedly Oleg’s role was increased significantly through post-production.
You will be bamboozled by the last act. One Ranger leads to a dramatic encounter that later loses its weight strangely at the climax point. It was another editing decision that just took out every bit of tension from this story just like in deflation of a balloon. On The Expanse, they were amazing as Jane and Tipper respectively but their reunion in this case is very disappointing. It started off so well with One Ranger but then it went downhill really fast.
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