Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002)

Pretty Good

It is a performances centric movie

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

I knew the reviews said this was horrible but sometimes when you hear a film is really bad- you wanna check this out. So I rented it.And yes it is horrible! First of all - the plot is so stupid, but even average action films have decent plots.Second - the action scenes are simply mainly Antonio chasing Lucy Liu so it feels more like a cat and mouse game that doesn't end.Third - this would be way more appropriate for a video game that people just wanna shoot people and chase them - these things do not make a good movie! I honestly don't know what Lucy Liu in particular was thinking. As for Antonio, well I guess he had to do something to make his presence in Hollywood better so I guess I can't blame him..but come on you can do better than this garbage.Avoid at all costs!

Ah, I know, it doesn't entirely spell chaos, but a viewing of this might lead you to serious consideration that it should. Where to begin? Well, there is one interesting and noteworthy thing to this: One particular stunt, which I'm not sure has been seen elsewhere. Apart from that... oh dear. You know those movies where you're just thinking "how on Earth did this get made"? Not so with this one. I know why it was done, because it's actually got a concept or two that could be amazing, if someone with talent had been handling it. No, we're looking at wasted potential, and so much of it you have to be astounded that they managed to fit it all into one 90-minute package of crap. In case you have heard a description of the music herein: Yes, it's awesome, and completely fitting for a flick of this type, however, every single piece is ruined and misused(is it too much to ask for that they at least *try* to make what happens on-screen follow the tunes?). In fact, all of the editing is pretty bad(have you ever wondered how one would go about messing up *flashbacks*, on the very basic level? Look no further). The plot has silly twists and doesn't all make sense... honestly, this whole thing is powerfully unengaging. Thus, not even the action gets the audience going, in spite of it not sucking all of the time. It is over the top once or twice, and someone needs to teach whoever put all those explosions in this thing the meaning of the saying "less is more". The martial arts are fairly cool, save for a couple of clumsy moves, and a general tendency to film it in what may be the lousiest way imaginable. Acting is nothing special, then again, they had nothing to work with. The DVD holds interviews(all four are brief and not that worthwhile) with Banderas, Liu, Soto and Park(best thing about this, in my opinion), trailers(...no, they're not the exact same, I swear) and something called "B roll", consisting of a behind-the-scenes style look at footage being shot, and it's... cut? No, that's not it... "thrown", that's it... together casually. I recommend this... hm... I don't know... to people I don't like, maybe. 1/10

...........it even has a thin story line, it even has a believable subplot, ..........................but it's more of a movie for the boom and the brass flying than for anything else. Further, a movie that depends on a video game for recognition can lose potential audience members. I've never heard of this game "Ecks vs. Sever" before today. Picked up the movie more for its femme fatale classification.Hence, those three factors, of boom and guns, of based on a video game, of good looking babes, means that this movie was probably made for the adolescent male.Come to think of it, aside from the femme fatale, the injured lover, and the hooker on the street, I can't recall any other woman in this movie with a speaking part.It's okay; the photography is wonderful and some of the angles are fantastic; it's 91 minutes of non stop action without really that much blood although for the amount of bullets flying at the hero and heroine, one would expect that at least a stray shot might hit.But it is hardly memorable. Major supporting characters are there then disappear from the rest of the movie. It's an endless supply of professional Federal SWAT who don't stand a chance against the heros and as the movie moves on, turn out to be quite the amateurs. And while the villains probably succeed in getting the audience to hate them, the heros fail in getting the audience to love them. There is no sympathy for the innocent and they might as well just be a picture on the wall.

The acting of both Lucy Liu and Antonio Banderas is very low-key - same as you would expect from main roles in a Western; very simplistic and sparse, seemingly shallow were it not for the implicit references to shared knowledge, which the audience is only let in on through flash-backs or from other characters. This way of acting suits them both excellently, and creates an attractive ambient atmosphere, energized by their martial encounters and growing mutual sympathy.The bad guys (Gregg Henry as Gant and Ray Park as his right hand Ross) do not contribute a whole lot to this movie. Gant is the sinister/smug/self-absorbed crook which Gregg also embodied as Val Resnick in Payback, and Ross' vocabulary is annoyingly redundant, particularly his constant use of the euphemism 'cancel' (one might be inclined to blame this on the script, but more subtle acting could have pulled it off by not emphasizing 'cancel' each time).Perhaps what I like most about this movie is that Lucy has a major role. In her other movies she is mostly spice to the plot, although Lucky Number Slevin does allow her personality to surface. To me, Ballistic is the best Lucy-movie. She makes a very lovely femme fatale, even agonizingly crisp in a catsuit.Do not watch this movie if you consider lack of dialog synonymous with shallow acting, or if you are just not a fan of low-key acting. If, on the other hand, you enjoy good atmosphere in a movie, Ballistic may be one of those you want to return to from time to time.I give it a low 7, and would have gone higher if the feel of the movie were not occasionally fractured by the Gant and Ross characters.