Is This Antonio Banderas Flick Truly the Worst Movie Ever Made?
Whether a person is rattling off the best movies ever made or the worst movies ever made, those distinctions are largely a matter of opinion. But for Antonio Banderas, there’s one 2002 film on his resume that seems to be regularly cited as the very worst movie ever made—both by critics and audiences alike.
In Wych “Kaos” Kaosayananda’s Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, Banderas and Lucy Liu star as Ecks and Sever, respectively—two former secret agents who join forces in an unlikely partnership in order to fight a shared enemy.
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The movie’s reported insufferableness has been made legendary by aggregated ratings site Rotten Tomatoes, where it not only holds an unsurprising zero percent rating, but is also officially known as “The Most Rotten Movie of All Time.”
In 2017, the website even baked a 0% cake in honor of the film’s 15th anniversary. (For the record, audiences were slightly kinder to the movie, as they often are, and gave it a still-miserable 20 percent rating—which is better than a goose egg.) Metacritic gave the film a slightly more generous, yet still abysmal, 19 points.
Reviews of the film, of which there are more than 115 on Rotten Tomatoes, seemed to inevitably take a more personal approach to the film, with many critics seemingly surprised—and even incensed—that they actually sat through all one hour and 31 minutes of the flick.
“For many viewers, the big question may be not whether Ecks and Sever will get together, or why they are fighting in the first place, but why am I sitting here, anyway?,” wondered Associated Press film critic Jocelyn Noveck, while Bowling Green Daily News’ Micheal Compton wrote: “If you must see Ecks vs. Sever, just go bang your head against the wall for an hour and a half. It would be the same effect.” Ouch!
Perhaps Consequence’s William Bibbiani summed it up in his 20th anniversary ode to the trainwreck, penned in 2022, where he concluded: “Sorry, Ecks vs. Sever. This critic tried, really tried, to find the good in you. But ‘it sure is a product of its time’ probably won’t do much for this film’s word of mouth. I guess not every bad movie has a cult following in its future. Some of them are just kinda bad.”