Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

I started looking through my blog the other day and realized I had not given a rating of less than 2.5/5 to any movie I have reviewed. That's when I decided to watch and review Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, generally considered to be one of the worst movies of the past 15 years. How bad could it be? Well, let's just say that I can now officially say that I have given a movie less than 2.5/5.

This movie is bad. And it's not even funny bad, just plain bad. I'll just get that out there. Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu play spies (or something) that are fighting against each other, but then they team up. That sounds extremely vague but that is because the entire movie is extremely vague. A kid gets kidnapped early on, and a few people are trying to rescue him, and there is a mention of some device to create super spies, but it is all just so jumbled. Even if I did piece all of the plot together, it would still be a paper thin excuse for a story. But hey, it's an action movie right? Story isn't everything in this genre so some great fight sequences could really make up for it!

The fighting is ludicrously bad. Seriously, you would have an easier time believing that they were dancing with each other rather than fighting. Bad guys just wait on Lucy Liu to kick them in the face. The fights are so disjointed it's somewhat hilarious. Lucy Liu will kick someone, wait a few seconds while the guy just STANDS there, and then finish him off. They at least could have sped the film up to make it look better, do something.

Instead, the filmmakers opted to go with the opposite approach: the ULTRA SLOW MOTION approach. The movie has a run time of 91 minutes. If there were no slow motion, it might last 45. EVERYTHING is in slow motion. Just about every time a person runs, it's in slow motion. Any explosion, yeah that's most definitely in slow motion. Some guy walks into a room? Yep, slow motion there too. Antonio Banderas turning around to talk to someone? Why of course that requires slow motion! It's more epic that way. You can tell that the movie is trying so desperately hard to copy The Matrix, yet it fails utterly, time and time again.

The editing in this movie is just obscene. If you can competently follow any of the action on screen, I give you major props. Things just come out of no where and happen for no reason! Cars and people just appear during fight scenes. There's a motorcycle chase scene that will leave you baffled as to what you just witnessed. At one point Lucy Liu is driving a car, and Antonio Banderas shoots out her tire, causing her to immediately crash into a car that was one inch in front of her. Why did he need to shoot out the tire if the car was going to crash anyway? There's one scene where Lucy Liu inexplicably wastes dozens of police officers, one of which is killed by a tire flying into his face. Where the tire comes from? No one can be certain, in fact I don't think that even director KAOS knows. Yeah, that's right, the movie is directed by a guy who calls himself KAOS. As soon as this came on screen, I knew that I was going to have to struggle through it. I'll give him credit, the man has a distinct style. I've never seen more fade in/fade out transitions in any other movie, ever.

The production value is just generally awful, especially for a film that came out in 2002. FBI badges look like they were created on Microsoft Word and thrown into a wallet. A guy uses a tape recorder that looks suspiciously like a Yak Bak. The score sounds like it was mixed for a Nintendo 64 game. Actually, that would be a disservice to most Nintendo 64 games. Every piece of music that comes on is laughable, and does not go with anything on screen.

This movie tries so desperately hard to be cool. I think that watching your grandmother play bridge for 90 minutes would be way more cool than this waste of time. Every character has a distinct SERIOUS ACTING FACE during the entire movie. The characters take themselves so seriously, which makes you wonder if anyone even watched the dailies on this movie. If you're Banderas, generally considered to be a competent actor, and you're watching yourself in this crap fest, how do you not say anything? Then again he looks like he isn't even trying for most the movie, so maybe he just didn't care. With that being said, he was by far the best acting performance in the movie. Lucy Liu is beyond wooden, and every other character is worse than her.

Please do yourself a favor and don't see Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. If you go forever without seeing it, your life will be enriched. Every single person involved with this film should be ashamed. I'm ashamed for having seen it.

1/5