A lot of people think Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever (B:Ev.S) is just another dumb action movie. Wrong! B:Ev.S is an action movie yes, but it is so much more: a sequel to Assassins, an entry to the Batman franchise, the third Charlie’s Angles movie, and a prequel to the Kill Bill series.

Young Assassin from Assassins didn’t get as assassined as we thought. Turns out, he came back to life and got a job with the FBI. He and his new wife were working on a special case when they got blown up by Gregg Henry. She died. He’s been whispering ever since.

Now, B:Ev.S is the story of how this whispering FBI agent gets all his lost shit back, but that’s not what you and a hundred million other people came to see. You all wanted to check out this new Batgirl!

No, she doesn’t dress like Batgirl, you can bet your ass that’s her. She just got done being a Charlie’s Angel and when she’s done with this shit she’s gonna go kill people for Bill. She doesn’t speak with words, just kicks. A jump-kick means she’s pissed. A kick in the chest means she’s losing her patience. And a kick in the nuts means you need to listen to her when she talks instead of just planning what you’re going to say next.

At first, Ecks is hired to track Batgirl down. No one in the FBI is aware that Gregg Daniels kills people for fun, so when Batgirl kidnaps his kid, they go all out to help him. That means getting the BEST. Ecks qualifies as BEST material because he insists on using a shotgun instead of the customary service revolver.

They meet up and have a fight. While reading her kicks, he starts to understand her true purpose may not be evil. One kick in particular, a heel-stab through his left hand, tells him that his wife is still alive and she knows where to find her. This is all it takes for him to leave the FBI and jump on the Batgirl bandwagon. Thus, the film’s title is negated in the first fifteen minutes. Now it’s called Friendship: Whisper Loves Batgirl (F:W<3’sB).

Once he gets to GirlBatcave, he finds out all kinds of crazy shit. For one, he confirms that his wife is not, in fact, dead. Where has she been all this time? Shacked up with Gregg Henry’s pee-pee, that’s where. Not only that, but the kid Batgirl stole from Gregg Henry? Not actually Gregg Henry spawn. Turns out that kid is a Whisper seed. Whisper…you ARE the father!

Batgirl tells him all this because she figures if he cheers up a little, she might be able to hear him when he talks. Turns out she used to work for Henry as kind of a precursor to Bill. When she got pregnant, Henry killed her baby. She needs Whisper to help her cook up a plate of revenge. Obviously, she can kick some ass, but she doesn’t understand psychology very well. Finding out that his wife married and fucked his enemy is bad enough, but now he’s all the sudden got a kid to feed and take to boring-ass soccer games. He whispers quieter than ever.

Luckily for her, Gregg Henry shows up with 50 armed bad guys and 1 Darth Maul. He’s come to collect the kid he still thinks is his. Gregg Henry…you are NOT the father! Whisper springs into action simply because killing people is the only thing that will make him feel better. He and Batgirl play cat-and-mouse with the bad guys by slipping in and out of abandoned train cars. Every once in a while, they take a few out with their guns. Whisper isn’t really helping that much because he’s using a shotgun that fires about twice a minute, while Batgirl has a machine gun that unloads around 200 bullets a second. Thanks to the magic of slow motion, this sequence takes about four hours to watch. Four, beautiful, ballistic hours.

Soon there are no bad guys left except Darth Maul and Gregg Henry. Batgirl takes Maul, while Whisper works on Henry. I’ll tell you right now, the comic value of Gregg Henry was not known to me at the time we made this film. It’s a little painful to rewatch F:W<3’sB, knowing what could have been. Oh well.

Anyway, Batgirl makes short work of Maul because he’s got no lightsaber or facepaint and his voice isn’t even cool anymore. She kicks him into a vat of acid and he dies (it’s in his contract that he cannot live through a film). Silently, she sneaks up behind the monologuing Henry and kicks him in the heart with her heel. Dead Henry. Whisper turns to thank her, but she’s already disappeared. Those Batfolk! So sneaky and rude!

Whisper’s wife shows up, and because she’s hot, he lets bygones be bygones. As the newly formed family drives home, the car gets bazooked by a Mexican drug cartel who used to know Whisper back when he was an assassin. Whisper lives, but his family is fucked. He runs home and puts all his weapons into a guitar case, walks into Mexico and starts killing every drug lord he can find. That’s right, F:W<3’sB is a prequel to that shit too.

So now you know why Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever is the greatest movie ever made. Tell your friends. But please, don’t tell anyone who made any of those other movies, cause if they sue me, I’ll be forced to kill their families. Not them, just their loved ones. Yes, pets too.

(three stars)