Metacritic reviews

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.

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

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.

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

Remote, non-involving and finally incomprehensible.

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.

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.

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

Movies don't get much worse.