YMMV / Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

• Award Snub: Surprisingly. Despite being universally panned, it was not even nominated for, let alone a winner of, a single Golden Raspberry Award. It's likely the film fell into You Will Be Spared territory for the Razzies.
• Bile Fascination: The only reason this movie ever gets mentioned nowadays is due to its notorious 0% with 119 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (making it the film with the worst score on the site, by far), with most people who watch the movie these days solely because of that.
• Cliché Storm: The biggest factor into its negative reputation. The movie didn't do anything profound or new with its genre and only relied on every single trope and trappings existing in the action movies of its time. Therefore, there is nothing much home to write about.
• Complete Monster (2002 video game): Robert Gant is an ambitious, manipulative higher-up at the NSA who plays the CSI and the NSA against each other in a power play to control both, getting dozens of good cops killed. Gant's true evil comes to shine regarding his relationship with Sever; Gant had not only her entire family killed, but her entire village along with it, having it blown up with no regard to innocent collateral simply because it was convenient for him. Gant even throws his corrupt ally in the CSI to die at the heroes' hands when the tide begins to turn.
• Critical Backlash: Infamous as one of the worst movies of all time (among Rotten Tomatoes' 0% club, it also ranks as statistically the worst-reviewed with 118 critics panning it), and that's led to some curiosity over the years, and in turn mild re-evaluation of its badness. Take a gander at general audience reviews over the years, and an increasingly common trend is saying that it's "not as bad as they say", being bad in a mostly generic and mediocre way rather than being "offensively" bad.
  William Bibbiani: "This was not the worst movie I’ve ever seen — it’s neither completely incompetent nor offensive to the senses and/or sensibilities — but it is that rare movie with almost nothing to recommend it."
  Nathan Rabin: "Does Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever deserve to be the worst reviewed movie in Rotten Tomatoes history? I don’t think so. I think that honor should belong to a movie with more personality, or with any personality at all. At the same time, I do think it deserves its universal zero."
• Narm: Every action scene has techno music playing, regardless of whether or not it's appropriate. Combined with how over the top they are, the action scenes just come off as laughable and reminiscent of cheap video games from the late '90s.
• No Problem with Licensed Games:
  • In a rare case of the video game adaptation receiving vastly better reviews than the movie it was based on, Ecks vs. Sever for Game Boy Advance was praised by many for being a very good first-person shooter for the handheld, with a unique dual perspective feature (players could play the game as Ecks or Sever, the story changing from their perspective). Oddly enough, the game was developed and released before the film even began production. To quote Rotten Tomatoes:
    "When you're getting worse reviews than your Game Boy adaptation, you know you're in trouble."
  • The game also got a sequel, confusingly titled Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, which follows the film's plot more closely and was released only a couple of days before the film. In Europe, the game was given the less confusing title Ecks vs. Sever II: Ballistic. While reviews were slightly more mixed than the previous game, it was still an extremely far cry from how the movie was received.
• Special Effect Failure: The CGI rockets in this 2002 film would have been laughably bad in 1982. The air cannon that fires the wheel off the Car Cushion is clearly visible as well.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The film had a climactic fight between Ray Park and Lucy Liu, a world-class stuntman and an actress who can fight more convincingly than most of her peers. If it were better-choreographed (well, if anything in the movie had been competent), it would have been epic.

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