The 2000s were a strange action decade. Studios were throwing money at comic books, video games, wire-fu, leather coats, nu-metal attitude, extreme sports, glossy CGI, and franchise bait without always understanding why any of it should feel exciting. Plenty of that chaos became fun. Plenty of it became embarrassing. These six sank past embarrassing into something more historic.

A 0/10 action movie has to be bad. I mean really bad. It does not mean that it’d simply have weak fights. It has to be a film that drains impact from punches, speed from chases, danger from explosions, and charisma from actors who should have had at least one decent moment to hold onto. That sounds impossible. But these films do that impossible: they take movement, violence, superpowers, tournaments, assassins, and world-ending stakes, then somehow make sitting still feel more intense.

6

‘Dragonball Evolution’ (2009)

Image via 20th Century Fox

Every anime fan who saw Dragonball Evolution in 2009 deserves financial compensation and maybe a handwritten apology. Funnily enough, I didn’t realise this back then either. Now I do. Dragonball Evolution, live-action film, took one of the loudest, weirdest, most energetic franchises ever created and turned Goku (Justin Chatwin) into a bland teen hero, with the emotional force of a rejected CW pilot. The mythology got flattened, the world felt tiny, and the wild martial-arts adventure spirit that made Dragon Ball beloved got replaced with awkward exposition and bargain-bin destiny talk.

The worst part is how embarrassed the movie seems by the source material. It wants the names, the Dragon Balls, Piccolo (James Marsters), Bulma (Emmy Rossum), Roshi (Chow Yun-fat), and the basic iconography, but it has no appetite for the size, silliness, color, or insane physical joy of that universe. The fights barely register. Piccolo looks stranded in his own villain plot. The Kamehameha should feel like a fan-service thunderclap; here, it plays like a special effect trying to leave early. This was action cinema with all the pulse sucked out of it.

5

‘Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li’ (2009)

Image via 20th Century Studios.

A Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk) movie should be a layup. Seriously. You have one of fighting games’ most iconic characters, a built-in revenge spine, underground crime, martial-arts spectacle, and a world full of colorful fighters waiting to punch personality into the frame. Somehow, The Legend of Chun-Li turned that into a gray, joyless slog where even the kicks feel like they are apologizing for bothering you.

Chun-Li is left trying to carry a film that barely gives her a pulse beyond solemn origin-story duty. The crime drama material crawls. The training beats have no fire. The action scenes lack the clean rhythm and impact a movie like this desperately needs. Then there is Nash (Chris Klein), giving a performance so bizarrely pitched that it starts feeling beamed in from a parody no one else was told about. Bison (Neal McDonough) should be a towering nightmare of villain energy, yet the film strips him down into generic gangster mush. A Street Fighter movie without color, madness, or thrilling combat is basically a crime against the arcade.

4

‘Catwoman’ (2004)

Image via Warner Bros.

The basketball scene alone should be preserved in a museum as evidence that Hollywood once lost its entire mind in broad daylight. Catwoman gives Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) a leather costume, feline powers, Laurel Hedare (Sharon Stone) as an evil beauty mogul, and the faint outline of a superhero action movie. Then it edits the whole thing like the footage was attacked by bees.

Patience is trapped in a film that cannot make her feel like a character instead of a pile of studio notes wearing cat ears. The action has no physical geography. The whip-cracking, rooftop posing, CGI cat behavior, and hyperactive camera movement seem designed to prevent the audience from enjoying the one thing the film should be selling: a cool woman moving through danger with style. The plot about toxic face cream is already ridiculous, yet the movie treats it with the confidence of a major myth. It is camp without wit, action without weight, and superhero fantasy without a single clean thrill.

3

‘Ultraviolet’ (2006)

Image via Screen Gems/courtesy Everett Collection

Ultraviolet looks like someone tried to turn a desktop wallpaper into an action movie and forgot humans were supposed to be involved. Violet (Milla Jovovich) is a superhuman warrior in a future where a disease has created a persecuted vampire-like population, and she has to protect a mysterious child from a fascistic regime. The ingredients sound ready for stylish chaos. The final movie feels like synthetic fog wearing sunglasses.

Everything is so smoothed, blurred, polished, and weightless that the action barely seems connected to bodies. Violet slices, flips, shoots, and poses through sterile rooms and digital backdrops, yet the violence has no crunch. It is all motion with no sensation. The world-building keeps tossing around factions, viruses, weapons, and child-messiah stakes, but the movie never makes them feel like anything beyond costume-change fuel. Violet should have been enough to anchor sleek genre trash with presence. Here, she is trapped inside a plastic screensaver of a film, fighting enemies who seem less defeated than deleted.

2

‘Rollerball’ (2002)

Image via Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures

There are bad remakes, and then there is Rollerball, a film that seems personally offended by the idea of momentum. The 1975 original had corporate violence, televised bloodsport, and a real dystopian bite. The 2002 version has Jonathan Cross (Chris Klein), Marcus Ridley (LL Cool J), Aurora (Rebecca Romijn), helmets, motorcycles, nu-metal sweat, and an action-sports aesthetic that screams for energy while somehow generating none.

The sport itself should be the centerpiece, yet the games are edited into mush. You never feel the rules, the danger, the strategy, or the physical joy of bodies crashing through a brutal arena. The movie keeps insisting this spectacle is addictive and dangerous, but every sequence feels like a music-video shoot that lost the music. Alexi Petrovich (Jean Reno) is stranded in corporate cartoon land, while the heroes keep drifting through rebellion without enough heat to make the uprising satisfying. The infamous green-tinted night sequence is almost avant-garde in its visual uselessness. An action movie built around a death sport should never feel this bored by impact.

1

‘Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever’ (2002)

Image via Warner Bros. Pictures

This is the rare action movie where explosions feel tired. Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever throws Ecks (Antonio Banderas) and Sever (Lucy Liu) into a spy-assassin conspiracy involving kidnapped children, secret weapons, corrupt agencies, and enough gunfire to legally qualify as weather. On paper, even a mediocre version should have been watchable. Banderas broods well. Liu can project lethal cool in her sleep. The title promises two dangerous killers on a collision course. The movie gives us cinematic white noise with muzzle flashes.

Nothing has texture. Nothing has rhythm. Cars explode, bullets fly, people sprint, glass breaks, and the brain still refuses to register excitement. Ecks is a grieving ex-agent pulled back into the mess, Sever is an elite assassin with her own agenda, and the film somehow makes their conflict feel like two screensavers arguing. The plot is both overcomplicated and empty, which is a special kind of action-movie failure. The stunts never build. The emotions never land. The characters never spark. It is not even fun to hate-watch for long. A true 0/10 action movie: loud enough to give you a headache, dead enough to make you check the clock.

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever

Release Date

September 20, 2002

Runtime

91 Minutes

Director

Wych Kaosayananda

Writers

Alan B. McElroy