Me vs. Ecks vs. Sever - Part 2
Explosions ahoy! Welcome to the second part of a mind-numbing odyssey in which I detail the moment-by-moment experience of watching the film that Rottentomatoes.com recently put at the top of its list of the worst movies of the past decade: Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.
Scroll down or click here for part one.
And now, the misadventure continues...
52:45 Ecks is about to confront his (now) former wife at the
55:58 A car explodes in the flashback – ha! Exploding car count: sixteen.
56:20 Still in the flashback. Ecks is lying on the ground. A second car explodes. Exploding car count: seventeen, and now each thinks the other is dead, thanks to her current husband’s trickery (he had a remote trigger device in pocket, the dirty dog!). That said, when they’re reunited at the aquarium, they simply hug – she’s not even shocked. Your husband, who you believed dead for the better part of a decade suddenly reappears and you hug him like he’s – I dunno – your old roommate? And didn’t either of them have family or friends to let the other one in on the truth? What the hell is going on in this film? Someone should go to screenwriter jail for this.
58:00 Ecks and former wife get in a car with Sever to find out where the kid (really Eck’s son, of course) is being held. Wife calls her a bitch, Sever responds, “I’m the bitch protecting him.” Make that solitary confinement in screenwriter jail.
58: 40 The three of them drive away from the cops. In the background the sun is setting over a cityscape; it’s some of the worst compositing I’ve ever seen.
60:00 A police radio informs us that “He’s at the south end
of Victoria Park.” Mention a
60:11 Mother and son are reunited and leave. Ecks and Sever grab a whack of guns for the final showdown with evil husband and his men.
65: 30 Three train cars were just blown up. Although they aren’t tankers, they explode in balls of flame, and for some reason we hear glass shattering. Exploding train car count: three.
66:02 Sever – proclaiming “My turn” – just blew up a train car. Exploding train car count: four.
66:10 Why does this bad guy have a private army that sometimes works with the police and FBI? I don’t get it…
67:19 Ecks just blew a bunch of train cars – everybody’s having fun. Despite the massive fireballs shooting into the sky, no cops have arrived. Exploding train car count: seven – I think. It’s getting hard to tell.
68:01 He just took out another three using a single blast from his shotgun. Hopefully those aren’t his loads for duck hunting. And that brings us to double digits for the exploding train cars.
69:00 This is the part of the movie where Ecks and Sever got each others’ backs; each of them shoot enemies standing behind the other’s back. That cliché machine has been seriously overclocked for this film.
70:50 Enemies exploded via tripwire: six.
72:22 This is the part where the big bad guy has the drop on the hero and says something smarmy that defines just how dickish his character really is. “Power and profit – that’s what we do.”
73:32 A series of explosions! I dunno who or what has even blown up. And still no police…
74:36 Bad guys have broken into the secret, randomly steam-filled hideaway. Exploding door count: one.
75:49 Sever and main henchmen guy are having a showdown. They’ve discarded their weapons so they can slug it out old school, of course. Oh man, there’s blue smoke billowing from the cliché machine.
76:20 He just grazed her cheek with a knife. Now she’s grabbed a chain. Warning: sparks shooting from cliché machine!
78:25 Big bad guy arrives and throws a grenade into a vat of boiling liquid(!). Exploding water count: one.
79:20 The wife and kid just stepped off an elevator! What the hell? I thought they left a long time ago? They were actually just hanging out in the elevator?!?
80:00 And now a calm moment before the final showdown, in which the bad guy explains the his nefarious plans that the audience already knows. BOOM! Exploding cliché machine count: one.
85:00 Sever makes her escape, leaving behind a paper crane. Cue terrible R&B soundtrack tune and end credits. The film is mercifully short, I’ll give it that.
So, why did Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever make the absolute bottom ranking on Rotten Tomato’s list? It isn’t any worse than the average Jerry Bruckheimer film or something like XXX or The Fast and the Furious. In fact, it’s less obnoxious. Maybe that’s the problem, the film isn’t as flashy or “extreme” as those movies, so its cliché-ridden lameness is all too obvious. Case in point: explosions are fun to look at, but dozens of them, that all look the same, aren’t very impressive. Bruckheimer, now he would’ve blown up fifteen cars all at once – before the opening credits – and then moved on to exploding aircraft carriers, razing cities to the ground and maybe hurling an entire continent into the sun.
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever has, um, well, er… a lot steam.
-Dave Alexander
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