Cuba plays an assassin for hire. He's hired by one Czech mobster to take out the rival faction. When he fails at killing his main target this one knows what's up and a war between mobsters break out. Cuba meanwhile thinks his job is done and goes back to what he does in his spare time, follow and watch over a pretty girl. Turns out that on one of his missions years ago, he was hired to kill her dad, and the girl saw him. It's something he never got over.
What he doesn't know is that the surviving mobster and his brother have hired Dolph to take revenge, kill mobsters and Cuba. They also get a hold of Cuba's handler. Cuba eventually is forced to come out of the shadows when some thug gives the girl a hard time. Of course she doesn't recognize him but she's attracted to him. Dolph is in the meantime wreaking havoc and killing mobsters left and right. When they finally meet, Cuba decides to let him live (!). That's when Cuba decides to finish the job and kill some more mobsters, setting things up for a second meeting with Dolph and the eventuality that the girl will find out the truth.
One In the Chamber is a great B action movie. And it looks like the B movie universe survives only thanks to action movies. Erotic B movies have completely disappeared, and so have B horror movies leaving us only with C-and-below horror movies. Hollywood is busy spending half a billion dollars making the umpteenth CGI movie about something silly destroying entire cities. This movie is your good, honest, old fashioned mano-a-mano action movie. No CGI, no anorexic girls beating up on bouncers, no nonsense. The script is very good, the direction is excellent, the locations beautiful (Romanian streets), and the cast does very well. Dolph as always just enjoys every role he gets. Cuba can act but frankly is just a tad bit outmatched by Dolph who must be 3 times the size of Cuba so I doubt that a knee to Dolph's abdomen would even be noticeable to him. The secondary cast also does well, especially Louis Mandylor and Andrew Bicknell. And Claudia Bassols is just gorgeous. Is One In the Chamber perfect? No, but it's so much better and much more entertaining than almost all the stupefying summer blockbusters and action movies Hollywood cranks out by the dozen.
