Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
Directed by Kaos
Written by Alan McElroy
Starring Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu, Gregg Henry, Ray Park and Talisa Soto
Classification: AA
Rating: *½
Andy Warhol's other great maxim about fame, "Don't read your press notices, weigh them," is relevant to the career of Lucy Liu. The once and future star of Charlie's Angels is now considered the queen of kick ass, even though her every big-screen performance, from Payback to Shanghai Noon, has been rendered in invisible ink. Ten minutes after the movie, you forget she was ever there.
Liu currently co-stars with Antonio Banderas, freed from parenting duties in Spy Kids II, in the action thriller, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. She's Sever and over the course of 90 minutes, Liu acts out her name by tearing 100 or so villains limb from limb. Plus, every now and then she pulls a bazooka out of thin air and -- fffpow! -- sends a truck or train sky-high.
Still, as a film combatant, Liu never really entertains or impresses. A lot of the hand-to-hand fighting is either speeded up or slowed down. Sure sign that the camera man and editor are doing all the hard work.
And the actress can never summon the cold relish we look for in an action hero. To paraphrase Muhammad Ali: If Liu even dreamed of whupping Michelle Yeoh, martial-arts star of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, she should wake up and apologize.
Perhaps because he's asked to throw his fights with Liu, co-star Banderas, normally a game and attractive action star, goes into a film-long sulk here. Which is unfortunate, because Ballistic, a very loud action flick that flubs both its gadget premise and back story, is in desperate need of charm and energy.
The first Hollywood film from Thai filmmaker Kaos could also used a good script editor. I had to read the press material to remember that the bad guy (De Palma bit player Gregg Henry) hoped to take over the global espionage industry with an ingenious device that is injected in a victim's body, then lies dormant until activated, blah, blah, blah. And there's just no figuring how Banderas's lost wife, Liu's missing baby, various assassination attempts and the bad guy's plan for world domination ever fit together.
About the only fun to be had in the movie is screenwriter Alan McElroy's cartoon spook-speak. Connoisseurs of bad action-movie dialogue will delight in scenes that have "DIA" operatives, dressed in what look like black beekeeper outfits, racing about Vancouver with machine guns slung over their shoulders, shouting directions into walkie-talkies, trying to figure out what to do with Lucy Liu.
Instead of saying, as normal, breathless people might, "Do you see her?" and "yep," the DIA agents call out, "Do you have a positive visual?" and "Affirmative."
When one DIA drone wanders somewhere he shouldn't, he is cautioned, "That's an unacceptable level of exposure." Unless you're looking to positively visualize more of the same, it might be a good idea to go somewhere other than Ballistic this weekend.