#89 Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (Wes)

#89 Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

So hands up anyone who’s ever heard of Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. Nobody? Well I’m not surprised, although I feel that I somehow should be. This movie, which was also a Gameboy Advance game, doesn’t generally appear on any lists of movies based on video games due to the fact that the game was based on an early version of the script. So for anyone out there, who’s looking for bad movies to watch, this can easily be overlooked (let’s face it, movies based on video games are a perfect source of awful entertainment).

Not having heard of this movie, but knowing that it was an action film, kind of made me happy. How bad can an action film really be? With the exception of pretty much every Steven Seagal movie, most action movies can surely be described as a “nonstop, rollercoaster of a movie”, right? Surely reviewers should be searching their thesauruses for words that can be used instead of thrilling, gripping and high octane right? Right?

Former FBI agent Jeremiah Ecks (Antonio Banderas) is called in to investigate the kidnapping of the son of the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (Robert Gant – played by Greg Henry). He was kidnapped by former DIA agent Sever (Lucy Liu), after she discovered that Gant had injected a nanobot assassin into his sons arm and was smuggling it into the country. Ecks and Sever eventually team up to fight against the corrupt Gant, who was also responsible for the deaths of Sever’s husband and child and who set up a car bomb that had convinced Ecks that his wife was dead (she also thought the same about Ecks and married Gant).

Yes the plot really is that flimsy, but overly complicated at the same time. Such a rare feat for an action movie, that I was almost impressed. It was as though the director, Kaos, decided that the time honoured tradition of a basic plot and loads of cool fights and explosions just wasn’t enough for his movie and he had to try to inject some story into it too. Unfortunately the story was just nonsense that detracted from the fight scenes and explosions.

I think that there’s probably a very good reason that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the king of action movies. He’s bloody massive for a start, so you can maybe suspend your disbelief for a few hours and enjoy him taking on entire private armies (Commando), lethal alien hunters (Predator) or classes of tiny children (Kindergarden Cop… hang on…). He can barely speak his lines, so the people writing scripts for him know not to bother putting in pesky words that may spoil your enjoyment of seeing him killing bad guys (or all humans if you’re watching The Terminator). Of course that is until he does dispose of one and then dispenses an awesome pun, that for a moment stops you thinking this could all be real, but makes you laugh so you can forgive that. So how do Banderas and Liu compare?

Antonio Banderas has starred in many action movies in his career. The excellent Desperado would be my highlight, but he’s also been in the family action trilogy Spy Kids, played opposite Sylvester Stallone in Assassins and even played the classic swashbuckling hero Zorro. So how is it that he doesn’t seem to know how to act in this movie?

His performance was so wooden, that I was worried that if he stood still for too long he would take root. Even Pinocchio would have given a more convincing performance. The last time I saw a performance that was as wooden as his, it was in a booth at the seaside and involved a man with a large nose beating his wife and stealing sausages.

Not only does he make a rather subdued performance in acting terms, but he also mumbles through the script like a he was starring in a school play. A school play about a man whose mouth is full of marbles and who is slowly turning into a wooden effigy of himself. I’m sure this could have been a result of the awful script though, maybe if there were a few more action movie type one liners to say he would have been more spirited.
 

Lucy Liu isn’t much better. She walks around in a trench coat for much of the film not smiling, and that is somehow supposed to convey the fact that she’s a cold-hearted assassin I think (everyone knows that the most important part of being an assassin is looking cool), but a cold-hearted assassin who has kidnapped a boy to protect him. I’m really not sure where they were going with this…

Amongst the bad guys you have Ray Park as AJ Ross, who is underused again (like in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace). Park is a skilled martial artist, but his fight scene against Liu is just badly choreographed. After the success of The Matrix, you’d maybe hope that the standard of martial arts in movies would go up, but unfortunately, this movie is less Jackie Chan and more Jackie Collins.

The action scenes can be described in with one simple word: Explosions. Boy does Kaos like to blow things up. In fact he seems such a fan of blowing things up, but so inept at directing, that a new career in party decorating could just be around the corner for him…

When things aren’t exploding, then Sever is shooting at people. I can only imagine that she didn’t learn her aiming skills at assassin school, but actually in The Death Star Shooting Academy. Her aim is that of the average Imperial Stormtrooper (and not those mysterious unseen ones that Obi Wan Kenobi describes as being accurate shots – but that’s a rant for another day). She certainly likes to shoot though, no matter how many of her targets she misses, as long as she can use a lot of different guns, she seems content. A full list of guns used in this movie can (worryingly) be found here: http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Ballistic:_Ecks_vs._Sever

That pretty much sums up everything that is wrong with this movie. It’s all style over content. But whereas in an action film like Point Break, where style is important, nobody forgot that entertaining the audience, even in the parts where things aren't blowing up, is the most important role of the movie.

Simply put, if you like explosions then this really is your movie. I actually enjoyed it a little. It’s not something that I would choose to watch again, but as a Sunday morning hangover movie, you could do worse. Of course you could always do a lot better too, but sometimes a lot of explosions and people shooting at things is all a beer addled brain can cope with. Michael Bay must be so happy at this fact.