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50This grim, joyless motion picture is anything but fun. It’s a chore to sit through, with all the blazing, noisy pyrotechnics proving unable to lighten the mood.
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25Sometimes it seems as though Hollywood can't make a decent action movie anymore. Now that's a thought to make you go ballistic.
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12The movie is a chaotic mess, overloaded with special effects and explosions, light on continuity, sanity and coherence.
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20Remote, non-involving and finally incomprehensible.
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38Offers the most onscreen explosions in recent memory. It's almost pornography for arsonists.
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About the only fun to be had in the movie is screenwriter Alan McElroy's cartoon spook-speak.
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25To pay for all the explosions and stunt work, the filmmakers must have decided to skimp on the screenplay. The rule of thumb is that one page of script equals one minute of movie, but there is so little dialogue in Ballistic that it could have been written on a matchbook.
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25Amply demonstrates how even a movie with wall-to-wall action can be a crashing bore.
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25This is a movie in which you rarely know where you are or who's doing what to the next person.
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12Banderas slums through this dollar-bin action flick wearing the same look of wiped-out exasperation that Danny Glover's Sergeant Murtaugh sports in each installment of ''Lethal Weapon.'' And like Murtaugh, Banderas might be too old for this, too.
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12Zomboid, convoluted excuse for a thriller is among year's worst.
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0Movies don't get much worse.
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30The tiny, impassive-faced Liu is a disaster. She looks cute in her custom commando gear, but she's not actress enough to make Sever's ridiculous, faux hard-boiled dialogue sound like anything but the formulaic nonsense it is.
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20To make a bad movie worse, even Ballistic's fight scenes, which ought to be the film's strong suit, are poorly edited, slice 'n' diced into incomprehensible blurs.
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50Kaos was apparently aiming for a coolly stylized, straight-faced take on ''Spy vs. Spy.'' As Maxwell Smart used to say, ''Missed it by that much.''
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60There's no defense for movies like these, but neither do they warrant apology; they're irresistibly watchable, like car wrecks.
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30I don't even care that there's no plot in this Antonio Banderas-Lucy Liu faceoff. It's still terrible!
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30Thai director Kaos (a.k.a. Wych Kaosayananda), making his inauspicious Hollywood debut, still can't breathe any life into it. You'll just want to get back to your Game Boy.
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20Looks 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.
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10The film isn't even as good as the second-rate game it is based on, which is nothing but a shootout.
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10You could run this film backward, soundtrack included, and it would make no less sense. --It's almost completely uninvolving, as well as being impenetrable.
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10This movie pulls out so many bad-action-movie cliches, you wonder if this is a how-not-to primer.
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10Before seeing this film I couldn't understand why the producers had given it a subtitle; afterward I realized "Ecks vs. Sever" was probably the full script.
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25The collateral damage of action products like Ballistic is to the sensibility of the audience.
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50Cut down to a frantic 88 minutes, you wonder if all the human moments were trimmed away to get to this abstract, humorless exercise in empty flourish.
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40The plot can be really tough to follow, in part because Banderas' accent, rarely a problem in recent years, is surprisingly hard to understand at crucial moments, and partly because it's tough to keep track of just who's working for whom...and why...and even where.