Banderes goes 'Ballistic'

2 stars out of 5.

Before I start in on this film, let me provide a frame of reference: I like stupid movies. They're my favorite. I think Predator is probably the best movie ever. I saw The Matrix four times opening weekend and I'm a charter member of the Tufts chapter of the Sly Stallone fan club. Kick things, shoot guns, blow things up, and play me some good loud music in the background and chances are I will like your movie.

Oh, and gorgeous women don't hurt either. Pick the right gorgeous woman and she could dangle shiny things at the camera for two hours and I'd watch. (Yeah, I paid to see Tomb Raider. Don't judge me because I'm easy.) One would think this simple formula of violence, a high degree of bad-ass, and a ton of sex appeal would be great.

That being said, there was absolutely no reason for Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever to be bad. None. No excuse, no possible justification, no reasonable explanation. This movie had everything I could possibly want as viewer. Lucy Liu was ridiculously hot, and she definitely kicked a lot of things. Everything in this movie blew up. And I do mean everything.

Antonio Banderas was extremely disheveled and bad-ass. Everything was set to a pumped up techno-rock. For Christ's sake, the bad-guy sidekick was played by Darth Maul. Darth Freaking Maul!! How could this have gone wrong?!!

The basic story line of this movie is fantastic. Ex-FBI agent Jonathan Ecks (Antonio Banderas) gets pulled back into the game for one last mission by the promise that upon completing the mission he'll receive information that will help him find his long lost wife. He's on the trail of Sever (Lucy Liu), a former DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) assassin who has kidnapped her ex-Boss Robert Gant's (Gregg Henry, of Payback fame) son. Of course, since this is an action movie involving the US government, Gant turns out to be a corrupt psychopath and Ecks and Sever must unite to take him down, finding the elusive Mrs. Ecks in the process.

They did a lot of things right here. The scene where the FBI brings Ecks back from retirement is brilliant. It doesn't get much better than a drunken, unshaven and dirty Antonio Banderas beating up 2 armed FBI agents in a bar.

Every scene involving Lucy Liu is brilliant. Taking a page from the Ivan Drago school of acting, she says all of six things in the entire movie. She does, however, kick just about everything in the movie and fires an impressive number of automatic weapons at everything she doesn't kick.

Towards the end of the movie, in a scene so bad-ass it nearly saved the film by itself, she has a kung-fu battle to the death with Ross (Ray Park, aka Darth Maul), Gant's chief enforcer/operative. At the end of the film, Liu and Banderas shoot just about everyone in whatever state this movie was set in, and they blow up everything. Not a lot of things, everything.

But there were parts of the film that didn't involve kicking things or blowing them up. As an example, Banderas finally finds his wife (Talisa Soto- Mortal Kombat's Princess Kitana)... at the Beluga whale tank in the local aquarium. You think I'm kidding, but I'm not. There's a mind-numbing five minute reunion/catharsis sequence, highlighted by dialogue so clich?© you could actually predict what they were going to say. The audience at the theater I was in was laughing hysterically as Banderas looked with burning intensity into Princess Kitana's eyes and told her he should never have gone on that last mission, that he should have quit and stayed with her forever. Not good writing. Bad writing.

While Alan McElroy's writing was bad, Kaos' (yeah you heard me, the director calls himself Kaos) directing is worse. In a cinematic choice vaguely reminiscent of Rollerball 2000's epic 20-minute night-vision-for-no-reason-whatsoever sequence, 90 percent of this movie was in slow motion. In some scenes it works: you can't watch Lucy Liu walk in slo-mo enough. But you absolutely can see enough empty train cars explode in a row. Enough, I've discovered, is exactly one. At that point you get the idea- trains exploding, fire, and death. Move on with the story. The next 46 slow motion train explosions are just annoying.

In the end, I guess I should have seen it coming. It ties back to the trailer, which was a microcosm for the film: lots of explosions, vaguely defined plot, tacky title sequence and little to no coherence. Lucy Liu did what she was supposed to (looked hot, kicked bad guys), Antonio Banderas was disheveled and unrelenting and everything in sight blew up, yet the plot was poorly tied together and cinematic tools were handled in a heavy handed and often tasteless manner.

In the end it all comes out to a fairly average crappy action movie. A more hands-off approach to direction and a touch of humor and character-depth in the writing could have made a great film with this cast. No reason, no excuse, no justification...this should have been an "A" movie and it definitely wasn't.