According to Wikipedia, it's one of the worst films ever made.
It only made $19 million of its $70 million budget back at the box office.
The film is directed by a person named "Kaos." (Now that may sound pretty x-treme. But "Kaos" is actually short for "Wych Kaosayananda." He was a son of a Thai diplomat who lived and studied in Pakistan. The more you know.)
Now here's the rub- let's talk about the film's writer. This man I've never heard of- Alan McElroy- also wrote Left Behind, Spawn, Halloween 4, Rapid Fire, Wrong Turn, and Resident Evil. That's a man with nothing left to prove. And nothing to lose. Just like a rebel cop who doesn't play by the rules...
The movie makes no sense. A kid gets kidnapped in the opening scene and we don't learn why he was kidnapped until after he's rescued in the last 10 minutes of the film. And even then, the thing that made the kid special doesn't make sense if you think about it.
Ecks and Sever are two rogue agents who fight (unnecessarily, for the most part) for the first half of the film and team up for the second half. So why the "Vs." in the title? The other well-known "Vs." movie- Freddy Vs. Jason- makes sense, because Freddy and Jason are primarily antagonists in there. Plus, they each have a strong back story. They merit a title with their names in it. But who is "Ecks" and who is "Sever" and why should a viewer approaching this film care that the two of them are in opposition? This is an unsolicited event movie that's totally uneventful.
The finale is set in what Roger Ebert calls "a smoke and fire factory." It looks like every other factory in every other film. A main character and a main bad guy throw their guns aside and have a hand-to-hand fight for no reason other than that is something that this movie has seen other movies do at this point in the movie.
There are constant explosions, chase scenes, shoot-outs, miscellaneous action...and it's still boring! Every scene plays out in a limp and lethargic way, with one shot after another delivering non-stop decaf action that just won't start.
The person who shot this film doesn't understand how to stage action or conversations or even how to set the simplest tone. The editor needs to be cited for the random slo-mo and sped-up shots too. They happen for no reason. Like most things in this film.
The music is incredibly generic. Every scene has multiple random songs playing over it, often shifting from one song to another like the sound editor got bored and changed the radio station. It sounds like a 55-year-old executive's idea of what he thinks a teenager would like.
-Lucy Lui leaps past a 15-foot-tall window that shatters and sprays a mist of glass over her.
-A guy falls off a roof and the overhead camera follows him all the way to the ground and he lands on a car. (The scene doesn't appear faked, either, so someone got hurt or it had exquisite CGI.)
-An overhead shot of an exploding train car fills up the frame with an ocean of fire.
-Antonio Banderas races through a series of explosions on either side of him and one of them actually appears to spray debris and sparks on his face. (Again- he either got hurt or it was solid CGI.)
There. I've been as fair as I can be to this film. It's really not good. Everything you've heard about this legendary bad movie is true. And it's not bad enough to be enjoyed as a bad movie. It's just kind of annoying. Watch it only if you can do so with a friend who can mock it relentlessly along with you and make "Ecks" puns for 90 minutes.
"This is ECKS-cruciating!"
"Wonder if that guy's an ECKS-ecutive at ECKS-on? Or if he was fired, he'd be an ECKS-ECKS-ecutive at ECKS-on."
"Look at all those ECKS-plosions! That's just ECKS-traordinary!"
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