Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

Only one memorable character breaks out of the tepid swamp of "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever," one of the most unaccountably boring action movies of recent memory. That character is the Sever of the title, and she is played by Lucy Liu. Your bias alarms are no doubt ringing loudly in your Spam-reading brains, given the previously stated predilictions of this reviewer, but hear me out: She is one of the "orphan class" members of the DIA (the intelligence agency of our shadow government; evidently, they thought this acronym was enough of a disguise). This class consists of female babies born to Chinese parents who wanted a son for their one allotted child; after they are abandoned by their parents, the DIA picks them up, drains them entirely of human feeling, and fills the void with training to "kill in a thousand different ways," as explained by Ecks (Antonio Banderas).

Nevertheless, somewhere along the line, Sever managed to penetrate and scatter the roaring numbness that must have dominated her life and have a son. This son was killed by Robert Gant (Gregg Henry), who maintains that she should not have had a son in the first place, given that she is supposed to be an emotionless killing machine. Given an added burst of revenge lust, however, she is an even more efficient killing machine, moving through her surroundings and directing her attacks with burnished-steel precision, luxuriating only in the chance to trade up to a higher-caliber weapon, speaking her few words in a voice that could freeze helium, and always with a bracing fire in her eyes, even as the rest of her body betrays no affect at all. Oh, yeah, and she's completely and utterly gorgeous.

So, yeah, hot 'n' deadly chicks are a turn-on for me, but isn't that an interesting premise for a character? Isn't it something you'd like to hear more about? You won't in this movie, to be sure, but the idea of her character is lingering in my brain even as the entire rest of this film is mercifully passing through. By Sever's side, Ecks is just some extremely hot man who lost his not-inconsiderably hot wife (Talisa Soto) to Gant and now he's getting back into the game of shooting innocent bystanders and blowing up urban scenery to get her back but it's in the service of getting this microscopic device that can assassinate blah blah blah. We've all seen that before.

In fact, as is standard practice in stupid action cinema, we've seen pretty much everything here before. The key is to make it fresh, and our director Wych Kaosayananda cannot do it, and worse, doesn't even try particularly hard. Kaosayananda, who hails from Thailand, has decided that an America that elected George W. Bush will not even try to pronounce his name, so he's calling himself "Kaos." That sounds bad, from a directorial standpoint, but what we get is even worse than intentional disorder: overdeliberate, sloppily blocked action scenes that aspire to spatial logic but really meander from violent flashpoint to violent flashpoint with no rhyme, reason or rhythm.

For this movie, it's not bad as such that all these American law-enforcement agencies are duking it out in Vancouver, or that Gant's house has to be the least secure headquarters of any cinematic supervillain in recent memory, overlooking the water with huge unprotected windows as it does. This is not logic that needs to be followed. But why is the motorcycle chase so tedious - stilted, even, in its flow? Why does Ray Park, who played freaking Darth Maul, get to fight only once in the whole movie? Why can't Kaos try something different than a nearly static medium-long shot to convey the physicality of his fight? Why do the anonymous black-suited minions of the supervillain continue to go into the abandoned railyard when it's obvious that Sever rigged the entire thing with explosives? And why doesn't Kaos realize that once we've seen one boxcar explode, seeing additional boxcars of similar size explode isn't really going to do much for us? And why did I have to manfully resist the urge to check my watch at several points during the film?

"Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" can't answer any of these questions, and that's why it's so damn boring, but Sever still stands out in my mind. In fact, I'm thinking of writing a script to further explore her character. I'll offer it to Lucy Liu, who unfortunately does not seem to have her pick of the scripts lately, on the condition that I also produce, direct and (ahem) costume. How did I come up with this idea already? Let's just say that thinking about making some other movie with Lucy Liu was way more fun than actually watching "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever."

A STUPID THING SAID BY A MOVIE REVIEWER IN A PUBLICATION WHOSE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES TOLD ME TO ASSUME THAT MY PROPOSAL HAD BEEN REJECTED

Kaos, the screenwriters and the actors occasionally seem to forget even the tiny handful of plot points that have been established, such as the names of the characters. Looking at the pile of pills Ecks inhales, a fellow agent, who presumably knows him, quips, "Is that why they call you Ecks?" Um, no -- Ecks is his name. - Andrew O'Hehir at Salon.com

If Andrew O'Hehir knew anything about drugs, he would know that the fellow agent was making a pun on one of the slang terms for 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, also known as Ecstasy, also also known as "Ex," which sounds the same as agent Ecks' name. And he's popping pills! Get it? This movie is stupid enough as it is without having to make crap up.

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