Bottom Feeders: Ballistic: Ecks Vs Sever Vs Bottom Feeders: The Review

It’s not going to be very often that I give a positive review.  That’s not what Bottom Feeders is about.  Not only am I intentionally reviewing movies that are widely considered to be the worst ever, it’s also a lot harder to positively review things.  That’s why Ballistic: Ecks Vs Sever has just joined what will prove to be a very exclusive club.  I’m not really going to give it a positive review, but I will say something sort of positive about it.  In this crazy, messed up world sometimes that’s all you get and it’s enough.

In most ways, Ecks Vs Sever is just like any other terrible movie.  It’s unoriginal.  It’s edited like crap.  The script is particularly bad.  I legitimately sat down and tried to give my entire focus to this movie and all I can tell you about the plot is that everyone wants their family back and nano bots are there.  Lucy Liu’s character is basically a mute.  She has maybe ten lines through the whole thing and it’s very obvious that her character was originally meant to be played by a man, or possibly a monkey.  What distinguishes this movie is that it’s not really the enjoyable kind of bad.  It stops just short of being so bad you can laugh and hovers there.  It stays in that perfect little zone where if it were any worse it would actually be a relief.  It’s a trick little siblings everywhere have mastered while shouting “What, I’m not touching you?!” but I’ve never seen it done so well on the big screen.  Instead of being fun and campy like some of my favorite terrible movies it’s the real kind of bad.  The hurting kind – the unfunny kind, like the death of a child.

So I watched this movie the same way you watch a snuff film.  It’s really only enjoyable if there’s something wrong with you, otherwise there’s only morbid curiosity.   Maybe that curiosity put me in a thinkin’ mood, because as I watched I was suddenly struck with a blinding flash of insight, possibly my greatest ever.  “This director is…some kind of foreign” I thought – and I was right, as I often am.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with being foreign.  We’ve been trusting foreigners to make movies for years now and they’ve really gotten the hang of it over time.  This one was different though.  Something felt out of place, like I was missing a piece of the puzzle.  I did a little digging (wikipedia) and the truth revealed itself.

Wych Kaosayananda (or Kaos) was born in Thailand and studied in Pakistan.  Before Ballistic he made one movie, “Fah.” It was the biggest budgeted movie in Thai history, and it completely failed at the box office.  Then someone tapped him to direct a 70 million dollar American movie starring two of the biggest actors of the time.  As soon as you know that, Ballistic starts to make sense and everything else in life stops.  Everything about the movie – from the fight scenes to the music to the other fight scenes – was exactly the way you would expect someone whose influences are Thai and Bollywood movies would make them.  It’s the type of movie where when people fight they shoot at each other for a while, drop their guns, spin kick each other some and then chase each other on motorcycles.  They don’t fist fight because they’re out of ammo or chase each other because it’s relevant to the plot; they do it because that’s what’s awesome for people to do when they fight.

So Ballistic: Ecks Vs Sever is bad, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not even close to the worst movie ever.  It’s a 70 million dollar social experiment designed to answer the question: What would this crazy Thai director do if we gave him 70 million dollars to make a movie?  He answered their question harder than any other question has ever been answered:  Explosions.  Guns.  Spin kicks.  He made this movie exactly like someone with Thai and Hindi influences would.  It’s an over-the-top Bollywood style action movie except with fight scenes that look like outtakes from Ong Bak and somehow it was intended for American audiences.  But here’s where that positive spin comes in, because it may be a terrible movie but it’s your fault for watching it.

Ballistic is Kaos’ own private dream world and although he may have put it on film, he didn’t ask you to go see it.  For some reason people gave him a giant pile of money to make a movie and maybe it’s just his lack of experience but this movie took the closest path from his brain to the screen light a bolt of lightning and didn’t stop for anything extra.  Not plot, not character development, nothing.  We’re literally watching someone’s unedited masturbatorial violence fantasy in all it’s messy wet glory and in a way that’s awesome.  It’s a film that never should have been made but was, and for a day Mr. Kaos got to be Michael Bay.  That’s the American dream right there.

What you should watch instead: Assassins.  It’s everything this movie wanted to be but harder and faster…better, stronger.

Feel like I didn’t do this movie justice?  Have a better suggestion for a terrible movie?  Hit me up at [email protected] and explain yourself before you cause pain to yourself.  Or, follow me on Twitter @Dan_Tompkins.  You can shout at me there and as a bonus, I will amuse you.