Snark, Critic and Pop!

Normally I like to let the reader know the year a movie came out. I think it’s important, it gives you a lot of background with a single number. The year helps you to understand what else was going on – what the culture was like at the time. For example, mentioning that The Hulk came out in 2003, the beginning of the Comic Book Movie frenzy, a time it was thought that no comic book movie could fail (which is the only possible explanation for a green light on Ang Lee as the director).

However for Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever I’m not going to tell you when it came out. To be honest, I can’t be bothered to look. With this movie, time frame simply won’t help – although I imagine it must have come out between 1999 and 2001 due to the name Ecks (pronounced X) being used. Of course given the quality of this movie I can imagine it being made more recently only they were too slow to realize that using X doesn’t automatically make your product or movie cool anymore.

Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever is a bad movie. Agent Sever (Lucy Liu) and Agent Ecks (Antonio Banderas) play a pair of top government agents who are fighting each other for no particular reason. Let me see if I can some how summarize the plot:

Sever kidnaps the son of Robert Gant, head of the government agency DIA, that did something bad to her that’s not really explained. Down and out ex-FBI agent Ecks is called in to help. Turns out that Ecks’ wife whom he thinks is dead is actually alive and married to Gant for because she as trying to protect their son who it turns out is the boy that was kidnapped by Sever who really just wanted to kill Gant and later decides to help Ecks and his wife get back together.

If you’re confused, good – cause so am I. For one, why did Ecks’ wife decide to marry Gant – all the movies tells us is there is some sort of explosion in the midst of some under cover assignment in which Ecks’ believes his wife to have died and she leaves him for the other guy – yet she is very excited about his return. Sever as the movie progress we’re meant to see as a sort of good guy – even though she murders countless innocent police early in the film.

At one point while trying to understand who he’s after Ecks comments how Sever “doesn’t miss”; which seems relatively accurate – until later in the film when her not missing would make the final showdown awfully short and boring.

The fight scenes between Ecks and Sever are probably the slowest and most dull martial arts fight sequences I’ve ever seen. The motorcycle chase is so slow and so cautious, I actually started to wonder if the murderer and rogue government agent were really just afraid of breaking the speed limit – don’t want to call attention to yourself after all. I hear cops sometimes let you get away with the small things – like destroying an entire mall and murdering many of their cohorts – as long as you can keep up with the important things like traffic laws.

I supposed it probably goes with out saying, but this movie qualifies as a Skip It. Unless of course you need a good laugh and are prepared to be downright bored 50% of the time.