Lots of Eck

Last night they showed Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever on HBO. When I first saw this movie a year or so ago, I thought it’d be some cool action flick with high-octane thrills and over-the-top stunts. I mean, it had a super assassin babe in it! How could it go wrong? I though that this would be a remake of that old Assassin flick (with Banderas and Sly Stallone), except with a war of the sexes touch, punctuated with tons of firepower and martial arts.
Well, it’s good that I never really got to seeing this flick in the theater, since it turned out to be NOTHING at all like what I thought.

Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever is a deception. The titular characters never really get into serious fighting- they only spar for one time, and afterwards you just know they’re going to hook up. It’s all by the numbers with a plot that has more bulletholes in it than all the slick action and timed explosions can cover up.
The movie starts with renegade agent Sever (Lucy Liu) kidnapping a little boy, who turns out to be the son of a powerful intelligence agency bigwig named Gant (Gregg Henry). The FBI more or less blackmails a retired manhunter named Jeremiah Ecks (Antonio Banderas) to take Sever down, with the promise that they will reveal to Ecks the wheareabout of his wife, whom he was told WAS DEAD FOR ALL THIS TIME. Wild, eh? Well, I guess Ecks’ wife has to be damn hot to still have his attention after ten years, but then again, it’s Talisa Sotto so why not.

Anyway, despite looking scruffy and unshaven and half-drunk, Ecks is supposedly the only one who can take on the leather-clad, unstoppable martial arts Terminatrix Sever, so off he goes after the customary initial griping.
Complicating matters is the fact that Gant has sent his own forces- an army of balaclava-wearing, fatigue-clad commandos led by Agent Ross (Ray “Darth Maul” Park)- to hunt Sever down.
Of course, all is not as it seems, and it turns out that Gant is the real baddie in this film (well, actually it’s shown early on so it’s no surprise), wanting to get his son back not so much because he loves the kid as he is looking for his nanotechnological superweapon hidden IN the kid. So when Ecks and Sever finally hook up (rather too easily), they put paid to Gant and his Time Crisis commandos in a hail of explosions and bullets.

This mess just has tons of gaping holes; like how either Ecks and Sever can just tear up the city battling Gant’s goons, and leaving body counts in the dozens without the real military and police EVER appearing? Or how heavily-armed commandos just blindly run after our heroes just to get routinely mowed down or blown up without so much as a protest or even a half-hearted attempt to graze the heroes at all throughout the movie. Or how boring and tension-less the action is, or how wooden the acting is all around. GAH.

The only good part here is watching Lucy Liu do her bad girl thing- more style over substance, but it’s really neat to see leather-clad super bitches kick ass. Too bad it all too brief, and all done so by-the-numbers, without much pulse or tension.

Good thing that the Battle of the Sexes espionage-action flick may be seeing light soon, in the form of the upcoming Mr. and Mrs., starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as two top assassins/agents unknowingly being sent to target each other. And Ray Park will be doing more and decidedly better martial arts moves in his upcoming Iron Fist (due in 2006).

It’s an even better thing that I didn’t waste money on this crapper at the moviehouse, or even on a dvd. THEN we would have really seen someone go ballistic. Heh.