By Stephen Pytak 

     Banderas looks cool.
     And Lucy Liu looks hot. 
     But in the end, nobody's going to care. 
The audience will be too confused by the 
tangled plot and too numb from the pointless 
slow-motion fireballs, shootouts and car 
crashes.
     On the surface, "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" 
seems like a film with potential. 
     The concept isn't bad. It suggests were in for 
the ultimate game of spy versus spy. 
     Reviewers panned the film the day it was 
released. It didn't even score one red point on 
the tomatometer at www.rottentomatoes.com. 
     I was surprised, but remained curious.
     After I saw it, I pitched a green tomato too.
     There were a few good action scenes, but 
nothing we haven't seen before. The best is when 
a federal officer is shot. He falls from a building 
in Vancouver. The camera follows him down. 
And he crashes on the roof of a car. 
     The plot is complex, and not in a good way.
     Banderas plays "Jeremiah Ecks," an FBI 
agent troubled because his wife is missing and 
presumed dead. He's hired to track down a rouge 
NSA agent, Liu's "Sever," who has kidnapped a 
young boy who is in possession of some top 
secret information. And Ecks only has 48 hours 
to find them.
     For one thing, there's no logic to the manhunt. 
Ecks somehow anticipates Sever's next move. And 
she anticipates his. Do they have ESP? Who 
knows.  And when they meet, there are shoot outs 
with machine guns and rocket launchers. 
     By the way, the one where Banderas is on a 
bus is the best. The final shootout at the rail 
yard is repetitive and mind numbing.
     There's more to the plot, involving Banderas 
being this young boy's father. But that doesn't 
make sense either.
     Ray Park, "Darth Maul" from "Star Wars: 
Episode I (1999)," also has a major role as 
another agent. But he basically just stands 
around most of the time until the very end, when 
he goes head to head with Sever. The fight isn't 
the best and feels tacked on. Park's martial arts 
talent is wasted here. 
     This film was written by Alan B. McElroy, 
who wrote "Halloween 4: The Return of Michael 
Myers (1988)," a better film. The guy has talent, 
but I have no idea what the heck he was trying 
to do with this film.
     With characters we don't know much about 
and a storyline we can't follow, the bullets on 
the screen just don't have an impact.
     See it only if you absolutely have nothing 
better to do.