Director William Kaufman's "One in the Chamber" is a nimble, respectable, bullet-riddled, little shoot'em up, with Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr. and "Expendables" star Dolph Lundgren as two hired trouble-shooters gunning for each other in the middle of a Russian mob war in post-Socialist Prague. About an hour into the action, Cuba and Dolph mix it up in a reasonably exciting fight, with Cuba delivering spinning kills a la Jean Claude Van Damme. The opposing sides of the Czech mob war are headed up by genre regular Louis Mandylor and Andrew Bicknell. Mikhail Suverov (Andrew Bicknell) and brother Bobby (Leo Gregory) hire Ray Carver (Cuba Gooding Jr.) to rub out Vlad Tavanian (Alin Panc) and Demyan Ivanov (Louis Mandylor), but Ray misses Demyan. This is one of the early scenes in "One in the Chamber" and Cuba is ice cool as an assassin with a .50 caliber sniper rifle who nails what he shoots at until Demyan seizes an innocent bystander of a girl as a shield. Demyan hires a troubleshooter called the Wolf, Aleksey Andreev (Dolph Lundgren), to eliminate the Suverovs. Ray is haunted by a job where he killed a man perusing the Bible and then refused to kill a small girl. He runs across this girl and she recognizes her family Bible. Things get complicated when Mikhail abducts Janice Knowles (Claudia Bassols) and Ray goes after them. Kaufman stages the firefights well enough and the Romanian scenery is diverting. The narrative is strictly formulaic, but "One in the Chamber" is tolerably entertaining nonsense. Dolph steals the show with his larger-than-life hit-man in a Hawaii shirt and a fedora. For the record, Ray has the chance to kill Aleksey, but he refuses to, and Aleksey visits him at fade-out to ask why. Ray explains that he wasn't paid to kill him. The two vow to join forces in the future. Louis Mandylor makes a good psychotic villain.
Review of One in the Chamber
