A brainless action flick, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever does little besides offering a barrage of explosions and gunplay.  Its story is ridiculous, taking a backseat to the over-the-top directorial style of Wych Kaosayananda, a Thai filmmaker who uses the pseudonym Kaos.  That's right – Kaos.  That should give you some idea of what you're in for if you go to see this movie.

Set and filmed in Vancouver, Ballistic is about a former FBI agent named Jeremiah Ecks (Antonio Banderas, Spy Kids 2) who lost his wife in a car explosion several years before the film opens.  Content to look sad and spend his time in dark bars, Ecks is one day approached by his ex-boss (Miguel Sandoval, Collateral Damage), who has some surprising news - Ecks' wife Vinn (Talisa Soto, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation) is still alive.  The catch is that Ecks will have to take on one last case before he'll be told where his wife can be found.

The case involves the kidnapping of the son of a DIA agent named Gant (Gregg Henry, who costars with Banderas in the upcoming Femme Fatale).  The suspect is one of Gant's former employees named Sever (Lucy Liu, Charlie's Angels), who is really good at blowing stuff up, flipping through the air and shooting whatever stuff she didn't already blow up.  It's clear Gant is a pretty bad guy, as he seems to ignore his wife's concern over the whole situation.  Additionally, he has also planted some kind of experimental thingamajobber into his kidnapped son (Aidan Drummond), and there's a reference to him exploiting unwanted Chinese girls and turning them into killing machines (a la Sever).

There are a couple of twists and turns every once in a while (in between the explosions), but it's nothing you can't see coming a mile away.  In fact, it's so painfully obvious how Ballistic will end, it makes you wonder why they bothered coming up with the addendum to the title (supposedly, it has something to do with a video game tie-in that had already been created before the film's release).

Aside from a nifty shot in which the camera follows a man as he falls off a tall building and onto the roof of a parked car, Kaos's idea of style seems to be showing typical action scenes in slow motion.  There are so many slo-mo sequences, the film would run about 42 minutes if played at normal speed.  Because of the way Kaos cobbles together the story, and the dippy way he shows flashbacks, Ballistic is often a bit confusing, but that doesn't prevent it from being one of the worst action films of the year.

1:31 –

for strong violence