This movie has neither plot nor characters – even the car chases and kung fu have to be squeezed in among the endless series of explosions and interminable firing off of whole arsenals of weapons. For once I can be absolutely sure I'm spoiler-free, as there's no story here to spoil.We have not one but two stereotype rogue agents, played by Liu and Banderas, battling it out with each other and armies of police and bad guys for reasons that never really matter. So why bother to comment on something so amorphously pointless? Well, for one thing it's very well put together. For another, Liu and Banderas are as good as they're allowed to be by the fairly nonexistent script and this is a long way from the worst you'll see. Also Liu's character is rather unusual. She effortlessly deals with all comers, including Banderas, who's soon reduced to wandering about, telling whatever poor sap is next in the firing line: 'She's gonna kill you. Good luck.' Super-tough women are nothing new but, as in Kill Bill, The Long Kiss Goodnight, etc, they're always given some point of vulnerability. Not here. Liu's Sever comes close to being a female James Bond, an unstoppable winner. The sad truth is revealed by a brief exchange of threats with the main villain, a photo, and Banderas' closing line. They actually did mean her to be fallible and vulnerable, but it just got lost along with all the rest of the characterisation.If you like explosions, shooting, tough women and either of these stars, and have time on your hands, you could do worse than watch this. But don't go out of your way.

There is a special place in Hell reserved for directors who put out this kind of torturous cinematic garbage. The "plot" of this movie, and I do use the term very lightly, is little more than an excuse to have a series of pointless and poorly done shootouts, explosions, and chase scenes. All scenes come with a generous amount of slow motion included. A little free advice, filming a crappy scene in slow motion does not make it better, it just makes a crappy scene take longer to get off the screen and on to the next crappy scene.Normally I would attempt to explain the plot now, but I really don't feel like it, mostly because I have very little idea of what the hell was going on in the movie most of the time. What I can tell you is that a small boy is kidnapped, and his father, who isn't really his father, is trying to rescue him because he will die from an experimental nanotech weapon that has been injected into his bloodstream, by the guy who isn't really his father. Confused yet? Don't worry it gets worse. The non-father works for the DIA, never heard of it? Neither has anyone else, but apparently it is a branch of the U.S. government and they have evil, corrupt people working for them and they like to blow things up, especially in Canada, which is where most of the film takes place. Don't ask me why two U.S. government agencies are having a wild west gunfight in Canada and nobody seems to care, it just is.So the DIA gets involved in a small war with the FBI in Canada over the kidnapping of the boy by a former DIA agent whose own son was killed by the evil non-father, and....screw it this is giving me a headache now. Suffice it to say this movie really, really sucks. The acting sucks, the excuse for a plot sucks, the action and effects suck, the editing sucks (in one car chase scene the day is rainy and the streets wet one moment, and completely dry the next) there is nothing to like about this movie. I should give the folks at MST3K a call on this one.

...........it even has a thin story line, it even has a believable subplot, ..........................but it's more of a movie for the boom and the brass flying than for anything else. Further, a movie that depends on a video game for recognition can lose potential audience members. I've never heard of this game "Ecks vs. Sever" before today. Picked up the movie more for its femme fatale classification.Hence, those three factors, of boom and guns, of based on a video game, of good looking babes, means that this movie was probably made for the adolescent male.Come to think of it, aside from the femme fatale, the injured lover, and the hooker on the street, I can't recall any other woman in this movie with a speaking part.It's okay; the photography is wonderful and some of the angles are fantastic; it's 91 minutes of non stop action without really that much blood although for the amount of bullets flying at the hero and heroine, one would expect that at least a stray shot might hit.But it is hardly memorable. Major supporting characters are there then disappear from the rest of the movie. It's an endless supply of professional Federal SWAT who don't stand a chance against the heros and as the movie moves on, turn out to be quite the amateurs. And while the villains probably succeed in getting the audience to hate them, the heros fail in getting the audience to love them. There is no sympathy for the innocent and they might as well just be a picture on the wall.

The acting of both Lucy Liu and Antonio Banderas is very low-key - same as you would expect from main roles in a Western; very simplistic and sparse, seemingly shallow were it not for the implicit references to shared knowledge, which the audience is only let in on through flash-backs or from other characters. This way of acting suits them both excellently, and creates an attractive ambient atmosphere, energized by their martial encounters and growing mutual sympathy.The bad guys (Gregg Henry as Gant and Ray Park as his right hand Ross) do not contribute a whole lot to this movie. Gant is the sinister/smug/self-absorbed crook which Gregg also embodied as Val Resnick in Payback, and Ross' vocabulary is annoyingly redundant, particularly his constant use of the euphemism 'cancel' (one might be inclined to blame this on the script, but more subtle acting could have pulled it off by not emphasizing 'cancel' each time).Perhaps what I like most about this movie is that Lucy has a major role. In her other movies she is mostly spice to the plot, although Lucky Number Slevin does allow her personality to surface. To me, Ballistic is the best Lucy-movie. She makes a very lovely femme fatale, even agonizingly crisp in a catsuit.Do not watch this movie if you consider lack of dialog synonymous with shallow acting, or if you are just not a fan of low-key acting. If, on the other hand, you enjoy good atmosphere in a movie, Ballistic may be one of those you want to return to from time to time.I give it a low 7, and would have gone higher if the feel of the movie were not occasionally fractured by the Gant and Ross characters.