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ballistic: ecks vs. sever
Banderas as Ecks, whose relentless determination is pitted against the skill of Sever (below right) and an army of bad guys.
Lee, former president of production at Columbia/TriStar Pictures and producer of last summer’s all-CGI feature Final Fantasy, encountered Alan McElroy’s screenplay for Ballistic and a tape of Kaos’ Thai feature, FHA, at about the same time and had little hesitation in bringing the two together.
In the two-year development process that followed, Kaos suggested one major change to the project: changing Sever’s character from a man into a woman. Since the character as written had more action than dialogue, this didn’t necessitate many changes to the screenplay, and it introduced a whole new dimension into the movie.
“By casting a woman in a role written for a man and not changing the dialogue to make it gender-specific in any way,” he says, “we underscore the fact that, ultimately, Sever is really all about the business at hand. And it makes for an interesting dynamic between these two characters who are equal in strength but still approach their craft very differently.”
What truly clinched the change, however, was the casting of Lucy Liu, whom Charlie’s Angels had established both as a major movie star and as a more than credible action performer. “Having Lucy in the role really works, because she’s able to convey an attitude visually without saying a word.”
Storywise, Ballistic belongs in the world of convergence technologies and conspiracy theories… and, of course, shoot-outs, car chases and massive fireball explosions. Set in Vancouver - not Vancouver pretending to be somewhere else: actually Vancouver - it plots the converging paths of two maverick agents. Sever (Liu) used to work for an organisation called DIA, run by the super-powerful Charles Gant (Gregg Henry). Governments like to think they control the world, but it is in fact DIA which controls the governments. And Gant controls DIA, which is on the verge of a breakthrough that will make it unstoppable: perfecting a lethal and undetectable device called Softkill.
Sever, whose martial arts and other skills are unsurpassed, holds a major grudge against Gant and gets her own back by kidnapping his six-year-old son Michael (Aidan Drummond). She has no intention of harming the boy, but knows that he represents what is possibly Gant’s only weak spot - the only place where he still has something approaching normal human feelings.
Jeremiah Ecks (Banderas’ character) - pronounced ‘X’ - meanwhile, is a former FBI agent who has drifted into a marginal existence after the death of a beautiful companion - an event which we see repeatedly in flashback, and in which we subsequently learn Gant was involved. When Sever snatches Michael and DIA agents begin to converge on Vancouver, the local security services persuade Ecks’ former boss to pressure him back into service. Before long, the two agents are on an inevitable collision course.
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