like a jackhammer to my brain

I just sat through Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever. It could be shown in film schools across the country as the perfect role model of what not to do in a movie. Seriously, it was perfect. I've never in my life more strongly wanted the last two hours back. I want to drive to the director's home and retrieve my time from him.

It's like he went through a checklist. Inappropriate music during action sequences? Check. Confusing and overly frequent use of slow motion? Check. People using a new gun every ten seconds instead of reloading. Inadequate martial arts training in all the main actors, and hits that miss by about ten feet. Empty world syndrome with absolutely no consequences for doing things like blowing up three tons of explosives in a trainyard. Completely meaningless storyline. Utter lack of any sort of climax. Stilted and painful dialogue. Bad use of bluescreen.

The main female lived in an abandonded warehouse, full of maintained buckets of boiling acid, and dramatic sparks falling from nowhere to strike the ground. The main male character set a trap for his enemy, set it off, and it left the enemy almost unaffected while knocking a pile of pipes onto himself.

I realized the movie was bad ten minutes in (well, I knew it was bad when I Netflixed it, but sometimes, bad is good. Armageddon is a good example) but I couldn't stop. It was too perfectly bad, not in a way that makes you smile or laugh, but in a way that causes almost physical discomfort. The DVD even had a built-in rock-paper-scissors "game" that looked like it was thrown together by monkeys. It was the perfect storm of bad movies.

I went to check IMDB to see what this terrible director had done previously... apparently one movie in Thailand. And nothing since. It made $14 million, with a budget of $70 million (I'd like to know where that budget was used)

I'm going to go give my brain an enema now.