Reviewed 17 Oct 2002 If any of you missed last year's Independence Day fireworks display, BALLISTIC - Ecks vs Sever has it for you in spades... BALLISTIC is arguably the silliest, most shameless display of gratuitous pyrotechnics in the history of cinematography. What we didn't realize until Director Kaosayananda showed us the true way, was that everything in the world is filled with napalm - all we have to do is shoot it, and it will explode like a tactical nuke. And to make sure we didn't doze off and miss anything, we even got multiple instant replays of the TOP view of explosions.
This time Hollywood has outdone even itself on its favorite re-tread, the "Evil Secret Service" plot. We are supposed to buy into the fact that the FBI and their ilk are intrinsically so evil and corrupt, that when our dark-side heroine, Sever (Lucy Liu), blows away dozens of the US' top espionage agents, this doesn't make her a bad person, this is just a normal response of a mother who has lost her child. Sorry, but this is just too outrageously over the top, there is just no way to buy into this fatuous premis.
One has to wonder whether script writers ever have their work reviewed by third parties, or do they just start filming...? Why would someone devise a nano-technology robot to be inserted into a host's bloodstream, so that they could - at a later time - press the remote and have it kill him? If they wanted to kill the person, why wouldn't they just do it at the time they were inserting the micro-robot? Hellooooo... anybody home in there?
Its too bad BALLISTIC didn't self-immolate in its own pyrotechnics. Since it didn't, it must be said that storytelling was passable; we were kept in suspense as to the characters' relationships. Although Lucy Liu is a lightweight kong-fu warrior, she is an entertaining screen presence. And could it be that Antonio Banderas is actually learning to act?
LEAST Enduring Line Or Phrase: "Power and profit, that's what we do..."
© 2002, Bangkok Eyes / bangkokeyes.com