Sometimes, even The A.V. Club isn’t impervious to the sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage. Which is why there’s I Watched This On Purpose, our feature exploring the impulse to spend time with trashy-looking yet in some way irresistible entertainments, playing the long odds in hopes of a real reward and a good time.
Cultural infamy: “Overwhelming dislike.” That’s how the opinion-aggregators over at Metacritic express with words a cumulative critical score of 19. At Rotten Tomatoes, it’s a whiz-bang 0 percent fresh, which means that no review out of the 107 they’re counting could be construed as positive. The movie? Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever, the 2002 flick starring Lucy Liu and Antonio Banderas, which may actually have been forgotten as early as 2000. (Einstein explains the quandary in his little-read work The Vortex Of Suck.) And that’s the sum total of my knowledge about Ballistic: the names of the two leads and its reputation for being horrible.
Unfortunately, B:EvsS, or BEVS, as I will hereafter refer to it, does not have a reputation for being so bad it’s good. What little reputation it does have is for being so bad it’s bad, and also because basically no one saw it, rented it, or paid it any attention whatsoever. It’s almost shocking that it even got a theatrical release, considering how quickly it disappeared from the public consciousness, or failed to penetrate that consciousness in the first place. It cost $70 million to make and has raked in just under $20 million, according to Wikipedia. But I don’t know anybody except Keith Phipps who’s actually seen it, and he had an excuse: He was working. Other fun facts before we begin: BEVS was written by Alan B. McElroy, the same guy who wrote Halloween 4 and the Left Behind screenplay, and who’s credited with the upcoming screenplay for Tekken. (Yes, that Tekken.) Director Wych Kaosayananda has just one other directing credit in the IMDB. Apparently no one let him make another movie after this one.
The viewing experience: All the above information raises the question “There’s no way this movie could possibly be as bad as all that, could it?” I mean, there are guns and shooting and explosions and it’s rated R, right? Expectations couldn’t be lower, so it has to surpass them. I even enjoyed Assassins on some level, so I’m probably the (half-retarded) target audience for this movie.
But as I watched its barely there 90 minutes, I kept hearing Eminem’s lyric from “Role Model” in my head: “How the fuck can I be white? I don’t even exist.” In this case, it’s more “How much can I suck? I barely exist.” Pretty much every frame of BEVS is instantly forgettable, from its paper-thin plot (which betrays the movie’s title—more on that later) to its stilted acting to its by-the-book shootouts. Let me try and name you 10 action movies off the top of my head that are better: Under Siege, Crank, Crank 2, Con Air, Commando, Cobra, Hitman, Shooter, Die Hard (too easy)… Even that piece of shit Taken, which made tons of money, was more memorable than BEVS. (I’m not saying it’s better—I can’t go that far.)
Anyway, here’s the plot—place it in one eye and let it seep out the other. Bad guy’s kid gets kidnapped. Antonio Banderas gets pulled out of drunken retirement to help find him. Lucy Liu did the kidnapping, but mostly because the bad guy is a bad guy, and she wants revenge. Eventually Liu and Banderas, who initially think they’re enemies, team up to kill the bad guy in an ironic manner, after letting him give a speech and blowing a bunch of stuff up.
In one of several attempts to make the movie “classy,” director Wych Kaosayananda (credited as “Kaos,” which is awesome) gets deep with the visuals. Banderas is miserable, which is reflected in the fact that he a) walks in the rain, b) in slow motion, and c) flicks his cigarette with extreme sadness. The scene also offers flashbacks to a traumatic event in Banderas’ life—the explosion of his favorite car.
When we meet the bad guy, played with light menace by Gregg Henry, he’s murdering one of his own henchmen by handing him a gun that fires backward. It’s incredibly stupid, and yet almost the only attempt to be clever in this entire movie, so plus and minus for that. Speaking of menace, Ray “Darth Maul” Park shows up as the baddie’s right-hand man, a.k.a. the guy who’s second-to-last to die in any movie like this one. There’s a reason he was largely silent in Phantom Menace, and completely silent in G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra, as Snake Eyes—he can’t act.
At some point we meet Lucy Liu, who’s an orphaned Chinese girl (cuz, y’know, they only like boy children over there) trained to be the ultimate assassin by Henry’s organization, which may be loosely based on the NSA, but who cares. The first big action scene comes when Liu is trapped in a mall, but blasts and kicks her way out. You know how on old TV shows, when characters were supposed to be running away from something, or doing crazy action, but they moved really slowly and choppily—as if there were reacting to a director rather than a bullet? That’s how Liu looks pretty much all the time. When she looks around for danger, she’s about as natural as Mark Wahlberg playing Dirk Diggler playing Brock Landers in Boogie Nights. Only it isn’t funny.