Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

There's no defense for movies like these, but neither do they warrant apology; they're irresistibly watchable, like car wrecks.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Cut 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.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

This 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.

Entertainment Weekly Bruce Fretts

Kaos 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.''

New Times (L.A.) Andy Klein

The 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.

Chicago Tribune Robert K. Elder

Offers the most onscreen explosions in recent memory. It's almost pornography for arsonists.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Stephen Cole

About the only fun to be had in the movie is screenwriter Alan McElroy's cartoon spook-speak.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

I don't even care that there's no plot in this Antonio Banderas-Lucy Liu faceoff. It's still terrible!

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The 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.

LA Weekly Paul Malcolm

Thai 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.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Amply demonstrates how even a movie with wall-to-wall action can be a crashing bore.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

Sometimes it seems as though Hollywood can't make a decent action movie anymore. Now that's a thought to make you go ballistic.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

To 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.

USA Today Mike Clark

This is a movie in which you rarely know where you are or who's doing what to the next person.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

The collateral damage of action products like Ballistic is to the sensibility of the audience.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

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.

Variety Robert Koehler

Remote, non-involving and finally incomprehensible.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

To 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.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Banderas 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.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The movie is a chaotic mess, overloaded with special effects and explosions, light on continuity, sanity and coherence.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Zomboid, convoluted excuse for a thriller is among year's worst.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

You could run this film backward, soundtrack included, and it would make no less sense. --It's almost completely uninvolving, as well as being impenetrable.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

The film isn't even as good as the second-rate game it is based on, which is nothing but a shootout.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

Before 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.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

This movie pulls out so many bad-action-movie cliches, you wonder if this is a how-not-to primer.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Movies don't get much worse.