Well folks, you can Ecks this movie off your list of films to see this fall, unless you want to go Ballistic, in which case I Severely recommend it. At first I wasn't sure why anyone would name a movie after an adjective, but after 30 car explosions and about 30,000 bullets, the name Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever seems to make a little more sense.
There's another problem: Agents Ecks (Antonio Banderas) and Sever (Lucy Liu) don't even fight each other for most of this film; in fact, they find out pretty quickly that their goals are the same. What their goals are... f--k if I know. Contradictions and confusion abound in this movie made by a director named Kaos, and I haven't even gotten past the title yet.
Banderas and Liu have invented a new breed of spy: Speaking in deadpan monotones, they go about their business as destructively as possible, carefully missing their adversaries with ridiculous weaponry again and again, in favor of hitting more explosive objects like cars, buildings and railroad cars. The good news is that Ballistic isn't very long--I calculated that if every slow-motion gun-fight had been played at full speed, this plotless waste of money and energy would only have lasted about an hour.
Had it lasted any longer though, I would have been forced to Sever my own head from Ecks-treme boredom.
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