Ballistic Ecks vs. Sever
For the opener, tell the story of tracking down a copy of this damn thing.
Director’s name is pronounced “Wick Chaos-igh-ya-nan-da” and he’s Thai but has lived all over the world including Islamabad, New Zealand, Moscow and Copenhagen before, I shit you not, landing in Boston, Massachusetts in the mid-1990’s alongside me at Emerson Fucking College where he studied film!
Plot: Ecks, Antonio Banderas, is a washed-up secret agent after his wife, Vin, dies in a car explosion. When his former boss arrives with a job offer and a surprise – a voice recording that indicates Vin is still alive – Ecks is called back into service to track down an assassin named Sever who is wanted by a big bad named Gant. Sever has kidnapped Gant’s son, and in a surprise twist, Gant is Ecks’s old buddy… who is now married to a still-alive Vin! Not only that, Vin thought Ecks was dead, so naturally she shacked up with Gant because she needed to protect Michael, her unborn baby who was actually Ecks’s son! There’s a whole other subplot involving smuggling nanobots across borders using Vin and Eck’s kid, but I won’t bore you with that because the movie has no interest in anything beyong blowing shit up. Like, blowing ALL THE SHIT UP.
Bottom Five Box-Office Bombs:
Honestly, this is one of the hardest bottom fives we ever had to do because so many movies could be considered bombs. The movie business isn’t kept alive by modest hits anymore. It’s kept alive by giant, tent-pole flicks that make hundreds of billions of dollars. The mid-size success isn’t really the model, so you’re not seeing a ton of $30 million movies making $120 million. You’re instead seeing movies that cost $200 million making $400+ million. They’re dealing in enormous amounts of money that is actually tough to comprehend. And gone are the days of modest profits and failures. So, looking back across the decades, it’s tough to find bombs whereas in more recent years, it’s almost too easy.
So, most movies aren’t wildly successful in terms of putting butts in seats. Their success relies on a whole set of exhibition channels in addition to domestic box office. That means there are a TON more recent bombs out there and that it isn’t really an indicator of how bad a movie might be. Movies like “Onward” from Pixar, which as the dad of two boys may well be my favorite from the studio, are considered bombs due to box office versus budget.
There are some notorious older bombs, including “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” “Blade Runner,” Carpenter’s “The Thing” and even freaking “Vertigo,” but in all those cases, they’re really good movies that just didn’t catch fire when they came out.
So the challenge here is finding a movie that really sucked, didn’t make money at the cinemas AND ensuring it’s one I HAVE SEEN. Like, who goes and intentially sees “The Adventures of Pluto Nash” or “Gigli?” Unless it’s for this show, I tend to stay away from this crap as far as I can – and that’s another thing… we sort of have an unwritten rule about not including stuff we saw in our bottom fives, so no “Cats,” “Jaws 4” or “Repo: The Genetic Opera!” for me! So here’s where I get stumped, because I have seen a lot of “bombs,” but I tend to stay away from the real stinkers. That means my list doesn’t have David Lynch’s “Dune” or “Krull” or “Moonfall” because I saw those and, despite them being bombs, I liked or even loved them! If I see a movie, the goal is to like it regardless of how much money it makes, so my bottom five is a list of failures that are also flicks I hate – and that’s a surprisingly short list!
5.) The 13th Warrior (1997)
Dir. John McTiernan (sort of?)
Budget: Between $100-160 million
Grossed: $61 million
The production history on this one is actually more surprising and fraught with twists and turns than the film itself, which was based on a Michael Crichton book called “Eaters of the Dead.” Essentially a retelling a Beowulf with a muslin protagonist that had found himself in the Northlands after falling in with a group of Vikings, the book was written by Crichton after an argument with a friend who considered Beowulf one of the “Bores of Literature,” an uninteresting work. Well, maybe Crichton’s book was exciting, but what ended up onscreen in 1997 as “The 13th Warrior” was anything but.
Offscreen, however, things were wild. Director John McTiernan had brought the picture into editing well over budget and over-schedule, but the test screenings were flops with the audience. The reception was so bad, in fact, that Michael Crichton stepped in himself to do uncredited reshoots and re-edits of the film, replacing a music score by the great Grame Revell and Lisa Gerrard with the ever-reliable Jerry Goldsmith.
What I remember most about the movie after seeing it at the cinema was feeling profound disappointment. After all, this was a film by John McTiernan, he of Predator, Die Hard and The Hunt For Red October fame! But this was a muddy, dark, poorly-shot, sloppily-edited and hard-to-follow mess of a movie that I simply couldn’t access. I stared long into the abyss of the screen and, as Nietzsche correctly explained, the abyss stared back into me. An impressive cast, headlined by Ecks himself, Antonio Banderas and including the late, great Omar Shariff did not impress.
Omar Sharif said of his experience working on the film:
After my small role in The 13th Warrior, I said to myself, ‘Let us stop this nonsense, these meal tickets that we do because it pays well.’ I thought, ‘Unless I find a stupendous film that I love and that makes me want to leave home to do, I will stop.’ Bad pictures are very humiliating, I was really sick. It is terrifying to have to do the dialogue from bad scripts, to face a director who does not know what he is doing, in a film so bad that it is not even worth exploring.”
4.) A Cure for Wellness (2016)
Dir. Gore Verbinski
Cost $40 Mil.
Grossed: $26 Mil Worldwide
I like that the US debut of this movie was at The Alamo Drafthouse’s “Butt Numb a Thon” because this movie, at 2 hours, 26 minutes, was painfully, idiotically boring and poorly paced.
What happened to Verbinski?
The movie stars Dane Dehaan – best known by me as the squirrelly Harry Osborne in The Amazing Spider-man 2. Dehaan plays a young New York City businessman who goes to a remote spa in the Swiss Alps to get his company’s CEO to sign off on the final details of a major merger. Only while there, he encounters beaucoup weirdness, ends up a patient himself and learns the treatments there are not anything the FDA would approve.
The film also stars Pearl herself, Mia Goth, and British actor Jason Issaac who is best known as Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies.
I found it dull, with the mysteries it presents never satisfyingly wrapped up and its cast appearing unengaged and lacking any charisma. The languid pace of it just frustrated the Hell out of me, so even if the cinematography by Bijan Bazelli is terrific, that’s simply not enough. Bazelli, incidentally, has an insanely diverse list of credits to his name – maybe one of the weirdest ever! Everything from Maria Carey music videos to A Gnome Named Norm to Boxing Helena to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Ring and Murder Mystery 2!
After its second weekend, the film’s earnings fell to $1.4 million and it was pulled from 97.8% of its theaters, going from 2,704 to just 88 screens. This was the biggest percentage drop ever!
3.) Mars Attacks (1996)
Dir. Tim Burton
Cost $100 million
Grossed $101.4 million world wide
This one is considered the first major misstep for director Tim Burton, who prior to this was on a pretty astonishing decade-long roll that began with Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure then ran through Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns and Ed Wood. Then there was this dumb, unfunny and deeply wacked satire of 1950’s sci-fi invasion movies which premiered only a few months after “Independence Day” raked in $817.40 million on a smaller budget. Ahem.
I do like that Burton wanted to stay true to the vintage Topps Trading cards series of the same name, but by gathering a host of A-List stars who did little but shamelessly mug for the camera, the homage seemed more like a condescending satire. Seeing Sarah Jessica Parker’s head grafted onto the body of a chihuahua and Pierce Brosnan’s head in a jar while the pair fall in love? Just no.
I saw this one in the theater, and at the time I was a pretty huge Burton fan, so it could have been my expectations being too high. But honestly, I just think this is the same kind of thing that happened to Burton in the 2000’s when no one said “no” to him. That was when he went on a shaky ten, or so, year run from 2001’s Planet of the Apes to 2012’s Dark Shadows.
2.) Inherent Vice (2014)
Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
Budget: $20 mil
Grossed: 14.8 mil
This is like “The Big Lebowski,” but with more grit, far less charm, and fewer laughs, which I guess is what you get when you replace Jeff Bridges with Joaquin Phoenix.
The movie is actually critically well-regarded and was named one of the ten best films of the year by the National Board of Review back in 2014. But these are the same assholes who put “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” in their top ten in 2008, as well as Downsizing in 2017. That said, my beloved Patriot’s Day was included in their 2016 list, so they’re not all bad. They just totally whiffed on Inherent Vice.
The story was recounted nicely by Mike in one of our episodes – I think it was one of his staff picks? – so I won’t say much more than it’s a neo-noir set in California during the mid-70’s and follows Pheonix’s PI character Doc Sportello as he uncovers a grand scheme involving several missing persons including his ex-girlfriend, Shasta, who was worried about her sugar daddy being kidnapped before she disappeared.
This is another all-star cast, with everyone from Josh Brolin to Resse Witherspoon and Benicio Del Toro writhing around in a labyrinthine and nonsensical plot adapted from a novel by the much-acclaimed writer Thoman Pynchon.
Mike, I know you love this one, but it’s one of the few in recent memory that I’ve seen that I simply did not want to finish. I cared about none of the characters, everyone seemed sweaty, dirty and stupid and none of it felt like it mattered. It was watching a bunch of big name stars act edgy and weird onscreen, and in that regard, it’s sort of like a bleak, even less fun version of Mars Attacks.
1.) Can’t Stop the Music (1980)
Dir. Nancy Walker
Budget: $20 million ($76 million in 2024 dollars)
Gross: $2 million ($7.6 million in 2024)
A loosely-based biography of the Village People that starred the band itself as well as a young Steve Guttenberg and Caitlyn Jenner when she was still known as Bruce?? What screams mega-budget success more than this?
70’s and 80’s uber-agent and marketer extraordinaire Alan Carr co-wrote and co-produced this disjointed, sloppy, unfunny and flat-out weird musical that I caught on HBO at my grandparents house and I have this distinctly vivid, terrible memory of watching this movie with my Nana when the YMCA number comes on and there was a naked dude’s shlong flapping around while he danced in the locker room. Yeah, no big deal. Just, you know, the horror.
The story, if anyone cares, is about Guttenberg’s character Jack, a songwriter, whose best friend is Sam, a supermodel played by Valerie Perrine, because, naturally. Jack asks her to pressure her connections and get his and his friends’ (the Village People) careers jump-started. This entails many shenanigans and weird tangents, including a bizarre sequence where Sam does an ad called “Milkshake” where she pours milk into glasses for six kids and tells them they could grow up to be just like The Village People. The bizarro-Busby-Berkley-inspired song-and-dance number that results, a black-and-white silver-clad disco nightmare, still haunts be today. As does the rest of this movie, which I haven’t been able to shake from my memories despite not having seen it since the early 1980’s.
Incidentally, the movie was directed by Nancy Walker, a veteran Television and stage actor with many a Golden Globe, Emmy and Tony to her name! She’d cut her teeth on directing sitcoms, including episodes of Rhoda and The Mary Tyler Moore show, buy this would be her single feature-film. After it bombed – an event attributed to the backlash disco was facing after years of dominating music – Walker returned to acting. Wise choice.
This movie, along with Xanadu, is credited as the inspiration for the Golden Raspberry Awards and was the first winner ever of Worst Picture.
Notes about “Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever”
- Does this woman refer to her husband by his last name?!
- Why is Ecks soaked?!
- Banderas is not even speaking. Just mumbling. This movie is going to be the longest hour and a half of my life.
- How the Hell did Ross and his team find Sever??
- The music is non-stop and pretty ridiculous.
- Ray Park is positively wasted here as Ross, the Prince of Darkness.
- The music actually makes these action scenes less exciting.
- Out of nowhere, one of the greatest stunts I have ever seen. Shot of a random sniper falling back-first on top of a car with the camera following him down.
- The slow motion robs these scenes of any and all tension.
- Ecks is just walking around with a giant shotgun.
- Why were Banderas and his boss radioing each other when they were mere feet from one another?
- I have no idea where people are in this movie. Suddenly Sever is in a car and hits Ecks with it. Then something blows up and he is randomly on fire?!
- Then she runs for blocks and suddenly he is in front of her in a building?!?
- Why does he have a shotgun trained on her and then suddenly switch to a pistol? So they can begin this horrifically bad hand to hand fight scene?!
- He is so terribly over matched. She is infinitely faster and more skilled than he is.
- Moment between Banderas and the little girl was actually funny. The girl in the daughter of his partner of sorts.
- Kid had a nanobot in his arm?! What the?
- All the guns she uses look ridiculous. Like Fortnite weapons. Just heaps of extra metal and casing.
- So Ecks pretty much immediately believes Sever is a good person. And he is bound to her by the loss of a loved one? She lost her son, he lost his wife – or did he? She appears to be married to Gant, this random bad guy.
- Why does Ross have beef with Ecks when Ecks tries to warn him about Sever?!
- Talisa Soto bringing it as the wife! And why the fuck is she married to Gant now?! Is she a bad guy?! And why did Gant put a nanobot in his son’s arm?!
- Ecks on top of a sliding bus with the world’s Connie’s Tommy gun? This is starting to feel like the kind of childhood logic we’d apply when acting out fight scenes with action figures when we were 7 years old.
- This is all nonsense. I have no idea who is after who here. This chase scene is so goddamn confusing. People end up in random places and on random vehicles.
- This movie looks like it probably cost a pretty penny too. These stunts are pretty impressive, as are the pyrotechnics.
- Christ the music is awful. It vacillates between bad metal, techno and Enya.
- Gant is played by Gregg Henry, a total that guy who is probably best known as Peter Quill’s grandfather in Guardians of the Galaxy. He oozes villain, has loads of henchmen, and I have no idea who he is or why Eck’s wife shacked up with him.
- Why are we now at an aquarium? Why is there an amazing shot of Talia Soto and a beluga whale?
- What the shit? Ecks’s first name is Jeremy? Antonio Banderas is playing a guy named Jeremy Ecks?!?
- “I know he loved me, but I became his wife only in name.” What the fuck does that even mean?!
- Oh, so, what? He thought she blew up and he thought she blew up?! I have no clue.
- I thought being with Gant was the only way to protect Michael, he unborn son, who later Gant puts a nanobot in and is kidnapped by a disgruntled former employee, Sever, whose daughter was killed during one of Gant’s bizarre international espionage operations.
- This is not Ecks Vs. Sever, it’s Ecks AND Sever.
- Where the fuck does Sever hang out? It’s like she has a bat cave kid kennel.
- Mom is smooching some swarthy mofo?! The fuck? Wouldn’t the kid be wondering where dad is? Would he call him Gant too??
- Where did you get all these weapons? Some women buy shoes… Oh Boy! lol
- This showdown makes no fucking sense. More kid-play scenarios.
- Targets and objectives come first. There are on incomes people only targets and victims. (Play that clip).
- Gant constantly looks amused by the death and destruction all around him. He’s a Bond villain without any real power, influence, plans or charm.
- I guess the ending is 100% just blow shit up. These are some huge explosions during this rail yard showdown between Ecks, Sever and Gant’s men who are, I guess, police?!
- Ecks seems to possess zero special sets of skills. He just walks around looking bored while shooting huge guns.
- Man, some of the stunt work is boss. This would make a good demo real if you just collect the stunts and explosions.
- Ha. A land mine to use as a booby trap WHERE YOU STAND ON IT TO ACTIVATE.
- Jeremiah?!? I thought he was Jeremy! Are you telling me Banderas is named Jeremiah?!
- Jesus. Did Banderas almost get killed in real life? It looks like an explosion went off in his face!
- This music… it’s like generic royalty-free shit that in no way enhances anything.
- Why do Ross and Sever toss away their guns? Is there some kind of honor at stake here?
- Finally we see Ray Park in action and it’s partially in slow motion?! The fuck?!
- Liu can act: she gives a terrific look at one point after Park taunts her about her family. There was probably a good movie in here someplace about the toll this kind of work takes on people, but oh god, it is not this.
- Ohhhh. Ok, the nanobot was smuggled into the country through his son. Got it. Ok.
- She looks unfazed by the crazy amount of shit she has been through.
- Killed by the nanobot. Good logic, but totally not a satisfying end for your big bad.
- She’s not a killer. What is she? A mother.
- The paper crane thing. Just… no.
- Wow. What a fucking mess.