The Dunk Tank: Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

Take two of the preeminent action stars of the time and surround them with perhaps the least talented crew ever seen, a murderer’s row of hacks, wannabes, and also-rans, and what emerges from the other end of the meat grinder, squeezed out like pork sweepings into a length of intestinal casing, is Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. The film’s cinematographer, Cats and Dogs and Home Alone 3 wunderkind Julio Macat, gives us a vision of British Columbia which manages to make real life look like a sound stage. All lighting is uniform, all exteriors and interiors austere and modernist — the laziness of the film’s set design and lighting cannot be overstated. In one scene no attempt whatsoever is made to match the lighting inside a car with that of the terrible green-screen exterior glimpsed through the windows. It’s like watching a cubicle farm hurtle through the heart of a sunset, fluorescents buzzing, Deb banging on the copier. Inexcusable.

Banderas is asleep at the wheel as Jeremiah Ecks, a former FBI agent who believes his wife Rayne (Talisa Soto) is dead, and if Lucy Liu shows a little more of a pulse as DIA agent Sever, it’s not enough to coax so much as a twitch from the movie’s moribund carcass. While the title suggests some sort of rivalry between the two, their interpersonal conflict is contained entirely within a single fistfight and the exchange of a few bursts of gunfire. The rest is all mumbled revelations about dual identities, preposterous early CGI sequences depicting a nanobot assassin, and dull-as-dirt monologuing by Gregg Henry as the villainous Robert Gant. To his credit Henry, a longtime genre heavy, tries his best to wring a little life out of the odious arch-criminal and DIA director, but the script is so leaden it’s like trying to get a shuttle into orbit with nothing but Roman candles for thrust.

Then there’s the soundtrack. I don’t know what Don Davis was going for with his combination of butt rock, overproduced Enya-esque feminine vocalizing, and random electronica, but the result is a torturous sonic hellscape which feels in no way related to events onscreen. Sever firing a high-caliber machine gun overlaid with someone crooning wordlessly as we slip into one of the film’s endless slow-mo sequences. Ecks awkwardly foot-pedaling his motorcycle around a stopped car as guitars thrash and scream. And astride the whole production you have a director who voluntarily goes by “Kaos”, a nepotism baby whose work has oozed out into the world like some nameless gray-brown discharge escaping the seal of an overloaded adult diaper. I don’t know who Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever is for, or how it got financed, or why nobody cared to make it anything resembling good. I suppose people need to fall asleep to something on long bus trips.