Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

As mentioned before, I wanted to throw a little Krapfest before officially kicking off my Kommitment to Klassiks. You know, see a couple of lousy movies I've been meaning to see before I get all high minded and whatnot.

Ballistic is a pretty legendary bad movie, always showing up on peoples' all time worst lists. I remember talking with my friend John about it when it came out... it looked like one of those silly, ludicrous action movies that is so misguided in its style that it becomes some kind of work of genius. Unintentionally funny, awful genius.

Well, on the accidentally funny scale (where Uwe Boll is the gold standard), this is not as amazing as House of the Dead, but it might be a little more hilarious than Alone in the Dark. It didn't disappoint, and I would watch it again if some friends were involved, but it's probably not quite a classic.

Shit, I should have been taking notes during this one, because there were a lot of ludicrous moments and details. So much that I'd almost suspect that this movie was maybe actually a good silly action movie... almost, except the actual action is so poorly done that I can't believe this to be the case.

You know, I expected a movie that was highly stylized and over-the-top, but in a completely misguided way that comes off as stupid instead of fun or cool. And I was right, but I did not expect it to be staged this shittily. There is no sense of energy or excitement in this movie. Even during all the explosions, and gun fights, and buses sliding on their sides down the road with a machinegun firing Antonio Banderas on top, everything seems to be moving too slow. And I don't just mean because of the frequently (and poorly) employed slo-mo shots. I know people gave Paul Greengrass a lot of shit for shaking the camera a lot in his Bourne movies, but damn if his flicks don't seem urgent. Someone needed to give the director and cameraman some caffeine on this one, get things moving.

There is one kinda actually awesome over-the-top moment where a dude falls off a building, and the camera falls all the way down with him until he smashes into a car.

Banality. That's the problem with this movie. None of the actors seem to give a shit. The dialogue is shockingly bland and arbitrary, to the point where characters start exchanging one-liners during the action scenes that aren't only unfunny, but don't even seem to make much sense. (Which, paradoxically, ends up being some of the funniest stuff in the movie). Even Gregg Henry, in the asshole bad guy Gregg Henry-role, doesn't seem like enough of an asshole. Early on in the movie, he gets mad at some underling for some failure, and demands that the underling shoot himself. The underling holds the gun to his head, and seems ready to shoot himself. Then, he suddenly points the gun at Henry and fires, and (get this) a bullet instead shoots out of the back of the gun, hitting the underling in the head and killing him.

This is just too perplexing to establish Henry as a bad guy. Where did he get this gun? Does he pull this trick a lot? Wouldn't people catch on? Why did the guy even consider shooting himself in the first place? If I fucked up at work, and my boss asked me to shoot myself, I'd just quit.

Any ways, I suspect that this would be a good one to watch with a group of loudmouthed friends, possibly while drunk. Which is probably what I should have done, but oh well.