A 2002 Action Thriller Is The Worst Movie Of All Time According To Rotten Tomatoes

No matter how hard our tech overlords try to convince us otherwise, when it comes to something like film, everything is subjective. But if we're going to live in a time when art is reduced to percentage scores and easily-digestible metrics are the only thing that makes navigating the endless sea of "content" on offer easier, then we might as well embrace our current moment and ask the question — what is the worst movie of all time? Of course, there is no definitive answer to this query, but that hasn't stopped Rotten Tomatoes from giving us its closest approximation.

Plenty of movies have earned a 0% Rotten Tomatoes score, Jim Carrey's "Dark Crimes" being one example. But have you ever heard of "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever"? Me neither. But this 2002 action thriller, in which Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu face off as opposing agents, has managed to distinguish itself, though not for the reasons Warner Bros. and director Wych Kaosayananda hoped. The trailer alone is chock-full of one-liners you'd expect from the type of schlock Steven Seagal churns out, complete with a "I don't do that kind of thing any more" scene in which a jaded Banderas is forced out of retirement. Coming as it did in the wake of the Wachowski's seminal 1999 sci-fi actioner, you might be able to pick up on some heavy "The Matrix" vibes in the "Ballistic" trailer, with injectable nanotech featuring as the MacGuffin while a be-shaded Lucy Liu takes on an entire swat team, decked in all black as she cartwheels between pillars amid a hail of ballistics.

Now that I type this I can't help but realize I've made this movie sound awesome. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case at all, as Rotten Tomatoes has dubbed "Ballistic" the worst movie ever made.

We all know there are plenty of films out there with the dreaded 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Heck, John Travolta alone accounts for seven of the lowest-rated Rotten Tomatoes movies of all time (we love ya, John). So, with multiple films failing to nudge the Tomatometer, how can one single movie be the worst of all time? Well, according to Rotten Tomatoes' own ranking, "Ballistic" has managed to claim that distinction simply by having the most negative reviews of any film on the website.

That's right, "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" has a full 119 reviews, not one of which is positive. Of those 119 appraisals, dozens came from so-called Top Critics, which is certainly unusual for a film with a 0% score. Typically, a 100% or 0% rating is indicative of a movie with few reviews, as was the case with Morgan Freeman's two lowest rated movies on RT. Due to the way Rotten Tomatoes works, the meter itself is a representation of a simple binary, i.e. whether critics liked, or did not like, a film or TV show. Which means that if there's only two or three reviews you're more likely to see a consensus — either a 100% or 0% score. But it is a real accomplishment to garner more than a hundred reviews, including dozens from Top Critics, and still keep that score at a flat 0%.

How did "Ballistic" manage such a thing? Well, according to RT's summation of the critical consensus, by being "a startlingly inept film" which "offers overblown, wall-to-wall action without a hint of wit, coherence, style, or originality."

It's worth noting that the average rating for "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" is 2.5 out of 10. This is a slightly more nuanced representation of the critical response, as it averages out the actual scores bestowed upon films by critics, rather than simply reducing a review to either positive or negative. Still, 2.5 isn't exactly anything to be proud of. But then, Warners and Wych Kaosayananda, who lamentably went by the pseudonym "Kaos" for this film, surely weren't expecting much more from what is clearly a stunningly derivative film — and I'm saying this based solely on the trailer.

But if you need any more convincing that this 0% score was well-earned, just take a look at what critics had to say. Much like the box office bomb and critical failure that was "Borderlands," "Ballistic" is the type of movie that prompts a flurry of rhetorical flourishes from reviewers, with several writers relishing the opportunity to craft searing indictments of the film. The AV Club's Keith Phipps surmised that "Ballistic," "looks like a video-game promo, has a story that plays like the fifth episode of a struggling syndicated action show, and feels like a headache waiting to happen." The Los Angeles Times' Manohla Dargis described "Ballistic" as "a generic blur of metallic blue and fireball orange set to the contrapuntal sounds of throbbing techno and eardrum-puncturing noise." Elsewhere, the Boston Globe didn't hold back on poor old Kaos, with Wesley Morris asserting that the director "is stupendously inept, unable even to properly light a combat sequence." Meanwhile, Empire magazine kept things simple, dubbing the film a "career low for both Liu and Banderas."

So, yeah, "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" isn't very good. It also didn't make any money, grossing roughly $20.2 million on a budget of $70 million. Still, it's worth bearing in mind that Rotten Tomatoes is the site that would have you believe there are only two perfect sci-fi movies in cinema history. So maybe give Kaos and his ill-fated actioner a go for yourself and see if it's really worse than that time Travolta made a John Gotti biopic or Sean Connery starred in an animated movie that looked like a bad Tim and Eric parody.