Upon seeing the stars, and seeing genre, and seeing how this movie won awards for being so bad, I couldn’t help but think critics must have been over-reacting. Maybe they’re not real action fans, I thought. Then I saw it for myself, or at least as much as I could tolerate. Not that I didn’t like the actors, or the genre, but it’s like one big acid trip. It’s like nobody’s doing thir job. It’s like everyone’s on something, and not really trying to make a good movie. I feel like I’m wasting my time watching this stuff. It’s so bad, I had to stop early. Very early. Like barely more than 20 minutes in. I skipped ahead to see if anything seemed to be improving, and it didn’t; so as much as I’m a huge fan of Antonio Banderas and Talisa Soto, and don’t mind a bit of Lucy Liu either, I simply couldn’t force myself to watch this tripe, it’s a waste of my life – well, most movies are, but this one particularly stands out in that regard.
Not that everything about this movie is bad, because there are some good attributes here and there. But the vast majority of the script, the acting, the sound, the integrated cinematography, the general atmospherics & momentum, the screen combat, and pretty much anything else I can think of, is like something you might expect from a college kids’ assignment. Minus a faint whiff of proper stuff here & there, particularly in how it’s packaged; it’s basically a B movie, and I don’t watch B movies. Well, it’s not a B movie per say, but it’s just as bad as one. I rate it Barely Watchable. That’s not to say you can’t watch it at all – it’s just to say I can’t watch it unless I’m utterly bored to the maximum. For once, I agree with the mainstream movie critics. It’s as if this movie was made as an April Fools prank. Roll up, roll up, there’s a respectable action movie here. Gotchya! Maybe some of the actors were pranked into being involved too. It really is that bad. Even the title is a mess – it sounds like it’s a sequel to something but it isn’t – it was just released to co-incide with the release of a computer game by the same name, which itself was a sequel to an earlier version of that game called (Ecks vs Sever). The game itself was a big hit for Game Boy Advance consoles, even if the movie itself is unanimously deemed one of the worst movies ever made in its genre at that budget level.
How on earth could it have a $70 million budget and end up like this? I guess it was generously sponsored to promote the game, then made in a hurry with cost cutting and money laundering.
Other action movies made in 2002 include Equilibrium and The Transporter – both awesome movies, on budgets of only $20 million and $21 million respectively. 2002 also saw the release of The Count of Monte Cristo which wasn’t so heavy on the action and didn’t have such big names but was a seiously captivating movie nevertheless, on a budget of $35 million. When you up the budget further, you get movies like The Scorpion King on $60 million starring The Rock, and The Bourne Identity on $60 million starring Matt Damon which spawned a massive 5-movie franchise.
There were also some super massive action movies in 2002, including Spider-Man and Star Wars: Episide II both boasting budgets in excess of $100 million. But $70 million is still a very serious budget so it’s quite shocking just how badly this movie turned out to be in practically every department.
Honestly, before looking it up, I was thinking maybe some spoilt rich kid was treated to the opportunity to direct a movie with such stars as Banderas, Liu and Soto involved. After looking it up, it turns out the reality isn’t terribly far from this theory. It was produced & directed by Wych Kaosayananda (under the alias Kaos) – he’s the son of a politican, who hadn’t directed any English movies before (only one Thai movie called Fah, 1998), and after this he took a 10 year break from the movie business altogether (to learn his craft perhaps?) but to his credit, he came back with some moderately respectable movies such as Tekken 2 (another computer game adaptation) which was a slight flop but was still more than watchable – I quite enjoyed it, as a former Tekken game enthusiast, even though it veered massively off-genre compared to the original Tekken movie and what would be expected of any film adaptation.