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 Release Date: 2002 Tagline: Your most dangerous enemies are the friends you've double-crossed. Director: Wych Kaosayananda Writer: Alan B. McElroy
* indicates Yakmala All Star |
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| Plot Synopsis by Blake: In the documentary on the DVD release, producer Chris Lee states, "When you're making an action picture, you have two imperatives: engaging characters, so it's not just noise on the screen that the audience doesn't care about, and to give them something they haven't seen before." Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever fails spectacularly at the first objective and accomplishes only one thing toward the second, though it’s hard to call it a success: you’ve never seen so much unnecessary backward driving. As the only conceivable way to enjoy this series of mistakes captured on film is to count the number of backward-driving scenes (make it a drinking game!), we won’t divulge when any of it occurs. But then, it’s hard to divulge anything about Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever because it doesn’t make any goddamn sense. The problems start with the title. The story isn’t really Ecks vs. Sever, as they start working together toward a common objective almost immediately after they meet. That objective: Destroy Robert Gant. The reasons? From what can be determined after two mind-numbing viewings, including several repeat looks at scenes with closed captions turned on because of terrible sound mixing, Gant is responsible for Sever’s son’s death, though it may have been an accident, because, as Gant tells her, the kid “wasn’t supposed to be there.” Gant has made Ecks think that Mrs. Ecks is dead, married Mrs. Ecks (who thinks her husband is dead) and raised a kid that she was newly, not visibly pregnant with, thinking the child is a little Gant though the movie says the kid is the progeny of Jeremiah Ecks. But the child, played by Aidan Drummond, is a pale white kid who looks a helluva lot more like cracker Gregg Henry’s blond Gant than he does either Spaniard Antonio Banderas’ Ecks or the Puerto Rican-descended Talisa Soto’s Mrs. Ecks/Gant. It is perhaps telling that the director calls himself Kaos. The actors seem to have been lost in Kaos’ chaos -- in the DVD’s making-of documentary, Lucy Liu (Sever) says, "I didn't really know what we were shooting anymore." Liu looks blank throughout the movie, as does virtually everyone else. The most alert creature in the film -- by far -- is a beluga whale. The nominal MacGuffin -- an insult to MacGuffins everywhere -- is a microscopic robot scorpion-looking thing that can be injected into, say, a head of state, and then trigger a heart attack or brain aneurysm -- not by remote control, mind you, but on its own unstoppable, unalterable timeline. Gant is storing it not in the bodies of any of his legion henchmen, but in the kid. Why it has to be in a human is never explained -- if it’s to be injected into someone to kill, wouldn’t it first have to be outside a human body? What good is it if it has to be stored in a living human when it can only be there for about two days before it kills the host? Are they hoping to transmit it sexually? And if so, again, why the elementary-school kid? There are a bunch of government-seeming agencies, but their jurisdictions are never clear. At one point, the shadowy guy who has told Ecks that the Mrs. is still alive actually says to law enforcement who for some unknown reason have let him speak unsupervised to the captured Ecks in an interrogation room, “This isn’t my jurisdiction.” The main henchman, Ross (Ray Park), gets the sobriquet “The Prince of Darkness,” but never lives up to it. He doesn't show any sort of sadistic streak, and in fact warns his boss against unwise courses of action. He says responsible-sounding things like, "Do not let her breach the perimeter," and, "That's an unacceptable level of exposure," never with a hint of menace. There are lines like, "A shadow government in the name of national security is still a shadow government." Others sound like questions the screenwriter wrote to himself in the margins of a draft about plot holes to be resolved ended up as character dialogue without any answers to the posed questions: When Ecks asks Sever how she knows that the kid is really his, Sever can only smile, as there's no explanation -- in fact, come to think of it, there‘s NO FUCKING WAY she could possibly know that. Things blow up, because hey, this is a Kaos movie. The first thing to go kaboom is logic. In one battle, even after Sever has eliminated all her adversaries, she just keeps blowing up cars willy-nilly. Guns are hidden under boxcars in train yards, there are landmines it train yards. One imagines Kaos’ main direction to his cast and crew was, “More fire!“ There are several scenes where one character has another dead to rights and then just goes for a different weapon, giving the cornered person the needed split-second to turn the tables or at least even things. In the world in which Ballistic takes place, grenade launchers must be easy to come by, because Sever is always discarding one: She takes one to the mall with her under her jacket while she looks at glass birds. After the big fight at the mall, she tosses it aside. Later, when Ecks is on a prison bus, Sever, standing on an overpass, fires a grenade launcher at it to free him. One marvels that Sever is sure that Ecks will be good to go after his bus is hit with a grenade, flips and crashes into other vehicles. But she's right: Ecks is A-OK. The other guys in the bus, not so much. There’s a climax you’ll never see because you’ll either have turned off the movie or passed out drunk from all the backward driving, so we’ll recount it here: Guns, train yard, incorrect representation of how land mines work, Sever extracts the robot thing from the kid, puts it in a bullet and shoots Gant, killing him with a heart attack (that‘s right -- shoot someone point-blank and he dies not from the bullet but a microscopic scorpion pincer giving him a terminal coronary event). Law enforcement agents of some kind arrive after the action has subsided and demand to know from Ecks where Sever is when she’s clearly escaping in the world’s loudest elevator pretty much in front of them. One is left with contempt for the “creative” team and a deep sympathy for the technical workers who rigged all those explosions and the stunt drivers who risked their lives at high speeds in reverse for naught. |
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