Adam Davidson’s One Mile arrives as an unusual experiment: two R-rated action thrillers, shot together and released on the same day, February 20, 2026, through Republic Pictures. Chapter One runs about 89 minutes. Chapter Two clocks in near 83. Watched back to back, they play less like a franchise launch and more like a single rescue story cut in half, now streaming on Paramount+ after a strong early-October chart run.
Ryan Phillippe stars as Danny Beckett, a recently retired U.S. Army Special Forces soldier trying to rebuild a relationship he spent years neglecting. The opening of Chapter One is deliberately ordinary. Danny meets his wife, Janine (Sara Canning), at their daughter Alex’s soccer game, then takes the teenager (Amélie Hoeferle) on a college road trip. The detour is the movie. An off-the-grid community, ruled by Stanley Dixon (C. Thomas Howell), pulls the pair into its orbit. Alex is taken. Danny, alone and outnumbered, has to use the terrain, improvised weapons, and whatever is left of his training to get her back.
Chapter One is the stronger of the two. The first act spends real time on a father who does not know how to talk to his daughter, and Hoeferle gives Alex more spine than the usual kidnapped-teen template. Once the community closes in, the film shifts into wilderness survival: fights that favor efficiency over choreography, a grim interrogation beat, and a third act that gets bloody in a hurry. Vancouver location work and Pascal Combes-Knoke’s cinematography give the compound a contained, uneasy texture. Phillippe is credible as a man who has skills and very little else. Howell, playing the patriarch, is the performance that sticks. Stanley is not a cartoon warlord. He is a leader whose authority depends on people agreeing not to look too closely.
Chapter Two picks up months later and has a harder job. Alex is taken again, this time as payback, and Danny goes back in without backup. The sequel is closer to an extraction film than a road movie, and Davidson mostly keeps the gunplay down so Danny has to think his way through the same hostile ground. Hoeferle gets more to do. Alex knows the layout, the danger spots, and how to move. The problem is structural. After the body count of the first film, the community still operates as if nothing official ever followed Danny home. The script, credited to TJ Brady, John Hlavin, and Rasheed Newson, from a story by Hlavin and Josh Senter, twists itself to justify the return. Some of those knots show.
The ending does land a choice the genre usually withholds. Stanley’s extremity finally becomes visible to the people who have followed him. He is about to shoot Danny when Alex, armed with a rifle taken from his office, kills him. Danny, Alex, and two others leave by boat with the community’s silence as consent. It is not subtle, but it is the one moment that belongs to the daughter rather than the operator.
Taken together, the films know exactly which shelf they belong on. This is the father-on-a-mission line that runs through Taken and a stack of direct-to-video survival thrillers, shot with more care than the average entry and less invention than the premise needed. Chapter One earns its runtime. Chapter Two mostly repeats the assignment. Neither wastes Phillippe, and Howell gives the villain a presence the plot does not always match.
For viewers who want a stripped-down rescue story with a mean streak and a father-daughter thread that actually matters, One Mile is serviceable weekend viewing, best taken as one long movie rather than two separate purchases. It does not reinvent the mile. It just keeps moving until the boat pulls away.
