Grade: D

Verdict: The movie's even worse than the title.

Details: Starring Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu. Directed by Kaos. Rated R for violence. One hour, 31 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: About a half-hour into the dismaying "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever," I began to count how many lines Lucy Liu had. (Hey, it kept me awake.) Forty minutes in, she'd had one line. An hour in, she was up to around 17.

"Ballistic" blows up more cars than that in the film's first 10 ten minutes.

Liu and co-star Antonio Banderas play top secret agents named Sever (her) and Ecks (him). They start out as rivals, then discover they're on the same team.

The picture begins with Sever kidnapping the adorable young son of a wealthy and evil industrialist named Gant (Gregg Henry), against whom she has some unspecified blood grudge. Meanwhile, Ecks, sporting impressive George Clooney stubble, is hunkered over a drink at some smoky gin joint. He quit the FBI seven years earlier when his wife, Vinn (Talisa Soto), was killed by a car bomb. Now his former boss wants him to track down Sever and rescue the kid. The bait? Vinn is alive and Sever knows where she is.

I personally know a dozen 10-year-olds who could come up with a better plot than this. Chances are, at least five of them could've made a better movie. Director Kaos (his Internet name or his WWE alias?) is a bargain-basement John Woo. Actually, he's not even that good, but he rips off such Woo motifs as the protagonists doing a punch-and-kick ring-around-the-rosy or shooting over each other's shoulders at close range to kill the baddies.

What "Ballistic" really feels like is a mid-'80s Chuck Norris flick in which zillions of extras (faces covered, so they can be recycled) are shot or blowed up real good. All the while, an irritating mix of electronic music and plugged-in Enya pounds in your ears. It's all so relentless that you finally have to conclude this movie wasn't made for people who speak English.

Banderas and Liu are the expected Teflon-coated action heroes, who bounce off pavement without a scratch and survive being buried under dozens of heavy metal pipes with only a slight ouch. Banderas even gets his own classic action moment: running toward the camera as a gigantic fireball threatens to engulf him.

He also carries the burden of the dialogue, most of which is used to explain what's going on. He's fine; in fact, someone should cast him as a disillusioned, alcoholic ex-spy in a real movie. Liu, who works up to around 36 lines by the end (I think), spends her time striking Lucy-in-Leather poses that would look great in a high-end fashion magazine. Her signature motion is a quick head snap so her lustrous hair whips around her face. Her least likely cosmetic moment: In her pumpkin-colored glasses, she recalls the young Yoko Ono.

Someone must've had some kind of money; these two don't come cheap. Yet the movie looks distressingly low-budget. For all its explosions, chases and machine-gun standoffs in a Vancouver shopping mall, the film feels paper-thin, as if Kaos had to capture all that shattered glass and crushed metal in the first take.

I'd truly hoped that "Ballistic" would be a kicky so-bad-it's-good guilty pleasure. But it's too flat, stale, confusing and lazy. At one point, Gant tells an underling, "Your job is to fix my mistakes. This should've never gotten this far."

Apparently, Kaos had no one around to fix his mistakes. "Ballistic" should've never gotten as far as a movie screen.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution