BALLISTIC: ECKS vs. SEVER (2002) Worst title ever? Maybe. What were they thinking? "Ballistic" would've been generic but serviceable. "Ecks Vs. Sever" would've been slightly cryptic and actually quite dishonest (their conflict with each other is short lived before they team up). But both? This is a title with a colon, a "Vs.", and two names which to my knowledge have never been attached to real people. So far as titles go, it really doesn't get much worse than this. The movie behind it ain't much better. It's basically movies like this that have gotten me to the point where I stopped caring about action movies unless there's a heavy sci-fi or fantasy element to them. There are only so many ways you can make explosions look cool, and they've long since been done, and when cool explosions are a movie's entire reason for being, well, I have to say I'm not into it like I was when I was sixteen. B:EvS might be no worse than a lot of what's out there, but that's what I'm afraid of. Antonio Banderas plays FBI agent Ecks, Lucy Liu, Sever. Sever is "orphan class", a Chinese girl basically sold to an assassin school which raised her into a killing machine. Like a lot of killing machines, she's not big on dialogue, and doesn't get any until about halfway through the movie. But she still has a tender side which fondly remembers her dead little girl (who, if it's important to you, she didn't kill). His backstory is even worse - he remembers his wife dying in an explosion and has been drinking heavily ever since. And yet his wife, who is still alive and now married to the villain, remembers HIM dying in an explosion. So her death was faked without her knowledge, and his was narrowly avoided but she was told he died...did she invite any of his friends to his funeral? Wouldn't they be confused when he invited them to hers? Did neither of them ever go back to their house? Both are apparently in pursuit of the villain, nicknamed "the Prince of Darkness" by the FBI. Man, what do you have to do to get the FBI to call you the Prince of Darkness? The Prince of Darkness has this top-secret dart-injected nanobot that can cause a heart attack on command. I like the idea of a nanobot that can cause a heart attack on command, but does it have to be delivered by dart? You'd think the whole point of designing such an expensive little kill-bot would be to make methods like shooting darts at people unnecessary. They pursue him into Vancouver, which was outside FBI jurisdiction the last time I checked. I used to hate that city, but I've let it go...it's really a very nice, very pretty, very rainy city that deserves better than to be the setting of movies like this. The locations are used well and photographed nicely; some movies work as tourist videos, as advertisements for the places in which they're filmed and set, and in that regard B:Evs.S works just fine. Ray "Darth Maul" Park plays the Prince of Darkness's henchman, and apparently an old rival of Sever, though this is left unmentioned until near the climax where she kills him (obligatory "two martial artists drop all their guns so they can do battle honorably" scene) before they can explain their relationship. He's good at fight scenes, but it's easy to see here why his lines in The Phantom Menace were overdubbed by another actor. Despite my having read a few times that Sever kills a whole bunch of Vancouver policemen in this movie, at no point did I actually see any of these policemen die. She has shoot-outs and chases with them, but they're very A-Team - lots of bullets, lots of explosions, lots of flying bodies, no blood. Citizens of Vancouver, breathe easy - your police department has survived this movie bruised and singed, but in one piece. The rest of the action scenes are same A-Team variety. I did like one continuous slow-mo shot of one guy falling off a building and landing on a car, and I liked Liu beating on multiple assailants with telescoping batons. Other than that, this movie has nothing that hasn't been done better a thousand times before. Director Wych Kaosayananda is aggrandizingly credited as "Kaos" - if anything, the action scenes here could've used more chaos, less neat n' tidy. The plot, however - yeah, total chaos. "Be smart - walk away." "Let's finish this." "Just like one big happy family." This is the shitty dialogue exchanged between people here, the kind of stuff that's only said by characters in bad movies, or people who watch enough bad movies that they start talking like them. Alan McElroy wrote this, and should probably either be mocked or pitied. The DVD comes with the lamest DVD extra I've seen yet, basically a game of paper-rock-scissors for people with nothing better to do than to play paper-rock-scissors against a DVD player. The movie might be dumb, but the implication that my life might be quite that empty is just insulting. BACK TO THE B's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE