Like One Shot, its overhyped predecessor, One More Shot is presented in the guise of a single take. Unfolding almost entirely in a Washington, D.C. airport (which is amusingly depopulated inside and out due to a fake gas leak threat), it could be called Try Hard 2: Try Harder.

Once again, VOD action extraordinaire Scott Adkins subsumes his typically stunning speed and ferocity into James Nunn’s second effort at a directorial flex — certainly no more novel now than in 2021, missing the character-development flourishes of the oner from last year’s Extraction 2, and far less explosively carried off here than in its relatively feeble forebear. Even cutting some slack for simplified choreography less likely to break a take, fight choreographer Tim Man largely abandons even the solid mechanics and movements of the original film. The only inspired idea here is bringing on fellow B-action icon Michael Jai White. Unsurprisingly, his clash with Adkins is a bright spot. Pity they wait until minutes before the deeply anticlimactic ending.

You’re just as likely to forget that in a couple of years as you have the first film’s finish, although the filmmakers sure place plenty of faith in your total recall. Picking up just hours later, One More Shot brings back both Lt. Jake Harris (Adkins), the Navy SEAL who barely survived the onslaught at a black-site prison, and Amin Mansur (Waleed Elgadi), the prisoner he was tasked to bring back to American soil for interrogation about a dirty-bomb plot at the State of the Union.

CIA honcho Marshall (Tom Berenger, uncannily resembling a bloated Joe Biden) and hotshot agent Lomax (Alexis Knapp) are there for Mansur’s handoff — along with Mansur’s pregnant wife, Niesha (Meena Rayann), as emotional leverage. Harris is headed for a debrief offsite when he stumbles upon a team of well-armed commandos. Can you call something this slow a race? Anyway, it’s off to the races again as Harris tries to protect Mansur, his wife and the knowledge Mansur holds from a highly trained goon squad before the State of the Union starts.

If Harris’s SEAL-trained methods of efficient dispatch felt inconsistent before, they have nothing on the convenient ways he leaves combatants alive here — pummeling one guy’s face to a bloody pulp with suppressed-bullet punctuation one moment, leaving another one stunned only for him to surface again a few minutes later. Nunn and returning writer Jamie Russell make effective use of airport scope — from the inner workings of baggage claim to people-moving escalators and trams — but there are also frustrating shortcuts for Harris’s maneuvers; after one decidedly incapacitating blow, he just shows up a few minutes later without a scrape.

Of course, only a few people knew where the plane was scheduled to land. Thus, there’s the question of who’s selling out whom here, and boy does One More Shot botch that answer. Without a phalanx of physically imposing villains to sell the threat as before, this sequel must rely on insidious ideological insistence. The performer tasked to deliver these diatribes is so stunningly awful at it that you’d think it was parody if the score didn’t insist on their seriousness.

Listen: Anyone who maintains a straight face while telling you this is somehow an improvement over Die Hard 2: Die Harder is jockeying for online attention at best or, at worst, illustrating supreme ignorance of meathead action-movie culture. One More Shot is clearly just marking time for One Last Shot in 2026, which will no doubt try hard with a vengeance.