Disclaimer: I’m a blind film critic, and I typically watch films with audio description. This movie does have audio description, and I believe it was the exact same narrator as Chapter 1.

When I watched One Mile: Chapter One, I was pleasantly surprised. Was it groundbreaking cinema? It hails from Republic Pictures, so of course not. It was a decent survival thriller built around a father trying to rescue his daughter from a community of breeders using that particular set of skills one gathers over a lifetime. Sometimes that’s all you need. Punch, kick, kill, repeat. A movie that understood the assignment.

Unfortunately, the sequel, or the second chapter, makes you rethink the repeat portion, as we find ourselves right back where we started in the last film. So it is quite literally punch, kick, kill, and repeat.

For those who haven’t yet had the pleasure, Chapter One had Danny (Ryan Phillippe) is a former black ops soldier who ends up battling a violent, InCel community while trying to protect his daughter Alex (Amelie Hoeferle). The first film ended with a clear open door for Chapter Two.

The sequel’s premise is essentially what if the same thing happened again?

The worst timeline of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, led by Stanley (C. Thomas Howell) returns for revenge and kidnaps Alex once more, pulling Danny back into the same conflict. Just when he thought he was out…

Now, repetition isn’t automatically a bad thing. Plenty of action franchises run on variations of the same basic premise. Remember? Punch, Kick, Kill, Repeat? Some of them even add things that go bang or boom. But the trick is escalation in the variation, and franchises that fall flat often forget how to change the stakes. Put more lives at risk, make the villain smarter, something.

What made the first film work, at least for me, was this scrappy Ryan Phillippe performance. Not knowing he’d be great in an action film. Plus, the enemies here are literally kidnapping teenagers and holding them to have sex with them and breed them. It is impossible to not root for all of their heads to spontaneously explode. Plus, that sweet ninety minute runtime. Never underestimate the power of not overstaying your welcome.

One of the bigger problems is that Danny’s decision-making in this film starts to feel less like strategy and more like narrative convenience. In the first movie, he was a capable fighter forced into a desperate situation. In this one, he often comes across like someone wandering into danger because he knows his daughter being taken a second time is a trap, so instead of appearing surprised and reactionary, he has to get back in a second time, without the element of surprise.

Phillippe still has the presence to carry a film like this. He’s believable enough as a hardened former soldier, and he’s clearly committed to the role. But the script doesn’t give him much to work with beyond repeating the same emotional beats we already saw in the first film.

Even the villain situation feels weaker this time around. C. Thomas Howell does the exact same thing a second time, but the film chooses to have this woodland survivalist cult leader leave home, fake pretending to be an Uber driver, all to get Alex back. It is a nonsensical plot development forced into the film that they can’t really explain, like the film asks you to not look behind the curtain, unaware that the curtain is open.

One Mile Chapter One had just enough charm to make me curious about where the story could go next. Chapter 1 literally takes place with an ending screaming for resolution, but the resolution is to just do this? This was all you had left in the tank? There’s an entire scene where Danny talks to an old military buddy, which could have upped the stakes, and turned a movie where he’s walking into a trap, into a film where he walks into with an asset.

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing here to enjoy. Fans of straightforward action might still find enough to pass the time, and the film does maintain a certain gritty tone that keeps it from feeling completely unwatchable. But One Mile Chapter One was never a great action film, it was serviceable, so this becomes a less than version of that.

If you liked Chapter One, you may still want to see how the story ends. Just don’t expect it to go the extra mile

Rotten: 5.7/10