eremiah Ecks (Banderas), a down-and-out former FBI agent, is drowning his sorrows in a seedy bar when he is summoned by his former employer. The FBI needs the brilliant and driven agent to help track down a mysterious female operative who has kidnapped the son of a Defense Intelligence Agency boss, Robert Gant (Henry). Ecks refuses. That's when his former FBI handler, Julio Martin (Miguel Sandoval), drops a bomb on him. Ecks' wife, presumed killed in a car bombing seven years earlier, is still alive. Take the job and I'll help you find her, Martin says.
But the female operative is no ordinary rogue agent. Code-named Sever (Liu), she is a Chinese orphan raised from infancy and trained in the lethal arts by the DIA. Ecks watches in fascination a surveillance videotape showing Sever handily defeating a squad of DIA commandos with her bare hands.
There's more. Gant is in charge of a "shadow government" that is seeking the ultimate weapon: "soft kill," a nano-robot that can be injected into the bloodstream and triggered remotely to cause immediate death, apparently of natural causes. One of Gant's men, Agent A.J. Ross (Park), nicknamed "the prince of darkness," is believed to have stolen the weapon from a lab in Berlin and brought it back into the country. Martin believes Sever may be seeking the weapon and using Gant's child as leverage.
Meanwhile, Gant's men have tracked Sever to a downtown cafe. Commandos position themselves around the public square. Nearby, Ecks and the FBI conduct surveillance on the operation.
The commandos prove no match for the lone Sever. When the smoke clears, Ecks and the FBI men move in. But Sever's not finished. After shooting one of the key FBI agents, she takes off, and Ecks follows in hot pursuit. When he catches up with her on a rooftop, he realizes that she may not be the adversary he's been led to believe.
A plot that's neither locked nor loaded
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever is the final version of a film that has gone through multiple incarnations. The film marks the Hollywood debut of Thai-born director Kaos, who originally envisioned the protagonists as both male, played by Chow Yun-Fat and Jean Reno. The studio had other ideas, and Liu and Banderas eventually wound up the film's stars. The film was originally slated for an August release, then bumped to September, then to November, then back to September. And the title was ultimately changed from Ecks vs. Sever to Ballistic at the last minute.
All of which suggests a troubled history and a project that never quite found its target—and the resulting film, sadly, bears out that expectation. The movie apparently aims at being a state-of-the-art action movie in the tradition of John Woo. But aside from a couple of the major set pieces, the action disappoints, and the movie otherwise spends a lot of time on artfully shot scenes that strive in vain to fatten up the bare-bones plot and emaciated characterizations. All the techno music and impressive pyrotechnics can't save Ballistic from misfiring.
As usual, the fault lies mainly with the script, which would be spare even for the GameBoy Advance video game based on the movie. Banderas' character consists mainly of a heavy five o'clock shadow, a rumply overcoat, a wreath of cigarette smoke and a cocked shotgun. Liu, similarly, speaks less than a page of dialogue in the entire film, and the audience is supposed to intuit her character's motivations from the single facial expression she wears through most of the movie.
The bad guys fare no better. Henry's smarmy DIA director is as paper-thin as a shooting-range target, and predictably meets the same ultimate fate. Park, better known as Darth Maul, shows surprising ability as a dramatic actor, but is given far too little to do to showcase his martial-arts skills, except in one fight at the end.
