Every Action Movie With 0% On Rotten Tomatoes Ranked From Bad To Worst

Most action fans live for the rush of a perfectly staged car chase or an explosion timed to the hero’s one-liner.
Rotten Tomatoes’ infamous 0% club is the exact opposite of that fantasy: a tiny, unlucky group of movies that
couldn’t win over a single professional critic. Out of the dozens of films that have ever hit 0%, only a handful
are true action movies, and they’re a wild mix of toy tie-ins, shark thrillers, direct-to-video brawls, and
expensive franchise sequels that went completely off the rails.

Here, we rank every major action movie that has landed a 0% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, moving from “just
plain bad” to “please make it stop.” Whether you’re an action completionist, a bad-movie connoisseur, or just
curious how things can go this wrong, consider this your guided tour through the bottom of the Tomatometer.

What Does A 0% Rotten Tomatoes Score Actually Mean?

A 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t mean a movie is mathematically the worst ever made. It means that among all
the critics counted, not one gave the film a positive review. Even mediocre movies usually manage
to charm a few reviewers; landing at zero requires a rare, unified shrug of disappointment. Film historians have
pointed out that only a few dozen films with enough reviews have ever managed this feat, so earning a 0% is almost
an achievement in itself – just not the one anyone wanted.

For the action genre, that 0% score is especially brutal. Action fans can forgive a silly plot or cardboard
characters if the set pieces deliver. When an action movie still crashes to 0%, it usually means the stunt work,
story, pacing, and performances all misfire at once.

Every 0% Action Movie Ranked From Bad To Worst

For this ranking, we focused on movies that:

• Are primarily marketed as action or action-adjacent (action-thriller, action-comedy, action-horror).
• Have a documented 0% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes at some point, often confirmed in lists of 0% films or genre roundups.
• Have built a reputation over time as spectacular misfires – not just forgettable programmers.

We’ll start with the “least painful” and work our way down to the king of critical disasters.

#12. A Low Down Dirty Shame (1994)

Keenen Ivory Wayans’ A Low Down Dirty Shame is the kind of movie that feels like it should at least be a
guilty pleasure. Wayans plays a wisecracking private detective entangled in drug money, exes, and cartoonish bad
guys, with Jada Pinkett Smith stealing scenes as his outspoken assistant. The tone veers between parody-level
comedy and genuinely brutal shootouts, and critics hated that whiplash. The story borrows from better action
flicks, the jokes don’t always land, and the plot is thinner than a VHS rental display copy.

Still, compared with the rest of this list, A Low Down Dirty Shame is almost charming. The soundtrack,
Pinkett Smith’s energy, and a few decent gags keep it from being completely unbearable. Plenty of fans maintain
that the 0% score says more about critics than the movie, which is exactly why it earns the “least bad” spot here.

#11. Redline (2007)

Redline looks like it was pitched as “The Fast and the Furious, but somehow dumber.” Produced
largely to show off real luxury cars owned by a wealthy financier, the movie follows a group of rich degenerates
who bet on illegal street races while shrugging through a barely-there plot. There’s a love story, some mob
pressure, and a lot of revving engines, but the only real hook is, “Look, a Ferrari!”

Critics roasted the movie as a vanity project with wooden acting and a script that feels like a first draft written
in the margins of a car brochure. Infamously, a $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo was wrecked during a promotional event,
becoming the most exciting thing associated with the film – and it wasn’t even in the movie. If you like watching
expensive cars drive in circles with no emotional stakes, Redline delivers. Everyone else can safely
steer clear.

#10. 10,000 BC (2008)

Roland Emmerich has blown up the White House, New York City, and half the planet in his disaster movies, but in
10,000 BC he decided to wreck history instead. The film follows a young mammoth hunter on a quest to
rescue his kidnapped love, trekking through a mashup of cultures and time periods that would give an archaeologist
a stress migraine. Domesticated mammoths help build pyramids thousands of years too early, languages appear out of
nowhere, and geography is treated like a mood board.

Critics pounced on the paper-thin characters, clunky dialogue, and CGI animals that never quite look convincing.
On the plus side, the movie often looks big and epic, and audiences did show up; it grossed far more than some
other entries here. But spectacle alone can’t save a story that plays like a middle-school book report on ancient
history rewritten as an action RPG.

#9. Derailed (2002)

Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Derailed is the cinematic proof that “Die Hard on a train” is not automatically
a winning formula. Van Damme plays a NATO operative escorting a high-value prisoner on a train full of civilians
when terrorists inevitably take over. That setup should write itself, but instead the movie derails into a haze of
confusing subplots, awkward edits, and bargain-basement effects that look suspiciously like toy models being blown up.

Fans of Van Damme’s earlier work complain that the action here feels sluggish and generic, with no standout fight
scenes to justify the ticket (or rental) price. With an incoherent story and tension-free set pieces,
Derailed feels less like a high-stakes thriller and more like something you’d half-watch on cable at 2 a.m.

#8. Precious Cargo (2016)

At first glance, Precious Cargo promises a fun, pulpy heist flick. Bruce Willis plays a ruthless crime
boss out to punish his double-crossing protégé and the thief who helped her. There are boats, guns, wisecracks,
and glossy locations – all the basic ingredients for a decent direct-to-video thrill ride. But the execution feels
like it was assembled on autopilot.

Critics describe the movie as lifeless and generic, with Willis seemingly phoning it in while the rest of the cast
struggles to inject personality into cardboard roles. The action scenes are staged competently but never become
memorable, and the twists are the kind you can spot even if you’re only half paying attention. It’s not aggressively
terrible, just aggressively pointless – which is its own kind of sin for an action movie.

#7. Hard Kill (2020)

Hard Kill became infamous as one of the glaring low points in Bruce Willis’s late-career run of
low-budget action films. He plays a tech billionaire whose revolutionary program could either save or destroy the
world, depending on which generic villain gets hold of it. A mercenary team is assembled to protect a MacGuffin on
an abandoned industrial site, and then…everyone mostly stands around warehouses shouting exposition and firing guns.

Reviewers slammed Hard Kill for recycled dialogue, flat direction, and an obviously disengaged Willis who
appears for only a fraction of the runtime despite top billing. The result feels less like a movie and more like
an excuse to string together a few shootouts in one cheap location. It’s technically an action film, but there’s
very little pulse.

#6. Dark Tide (2012)

On paper, Dark Tide sounds like a slam dunk: Halle Berry, great white sharks, and dangerous open-water
dives off the coast of South Africa. In practice, it’s a painfully slow thriller that forgets to be thrilling.
Berry plays a “shark whisperer” traumatized by a fatal attack who’s lured back into the water by a risky,
high-paying expedition for a wealthy thrill-seeker.

Critics complained that the movie wastes Berry’s star power on endless bickering, thin characterization, and a plot
that meanders between melodrama and tourism video. The underwater footage has its moments, but the suspense never
builds, and the shark attacks are oddly tame. When a shark movie manages to bore both horror fans and action fans,
a 0% score starts to make sense.

#5. Max Steel (2016)

Toy giant Mattel’s first big attempt at a superhero franchise, Max Steel, arrived years before
Barbie and did not inspire confidence. Based on the action figure line and animated series, the film
follows teenager Max, who discovers he can merge with an alien robot named Steel to unleash energy-based powers.
Instead of leaning into wild sci-fi action, the movie spends most of its time on exposition and teen angst.

Reviewers panned it as painfully generic. The origin story is stitched together from familiar superhero beats, the
visual effects feel dated even by mid-2010s standards, and the humor never quite clicks. For a movie aimed at kids
and young teens, Max Steel somehow manages to be too dull for them and too clumsy for adults. It’s not
offensive, just aggressively forgettable – and that’s almost worse when you’re trying to launch a brand.

#4. Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

Jaws: The Revenge, the fourth entry in the once-legendary shark franchise, is an all-time lesson in how
far a series can fall. The film follows Ellen Brody, who becomes convinced a great white shark is deliberately
hunting her family. She flees to the Bahamas, only for the shark to apparently swim thousands of miles just to
continue its oddly personal vendetta.

The movie is packed with unintentionally hilarious choices: a roaring shark, absurd dream sequences, and a finale
that defies both physics and logic. Critics absolutely tore it apart for bargain-basement effects and a script that
seems allergic to coherence. Michael Caine famously said he’d never seen the finished film, but he had seen the
house it paid for, which “is terrific.” That attitude pretty much sums up the level of artistic ambition on display.

#3. The Last Days of American Crime (2020)

Few modern action movies have been as thoroughly rejected by critics as Netflix’s The Last Days of American Crime.
Set in a dystopian near future where the U.S. government plans to broadcast a signal that makes it impossible to
knowingly commit crimes, the film follows criminals planning one last massive heist. It’s a great hook, but the
execution is punishingly long and shockingly tone-deaf.

Reviews blasted the film for its bloated runtime, muddy politics, and relentless violence with little to say. Coming
out at a time when real-world discussions around policing and state power were especially intense, the movie’s
grim fascist tech concept needed nuance it simply doesn’t have. Instead, audiences get nearly two and a half hours
of grimy brutality that feels less like entertainment and more like a test of endurance.

#2. Precious Cargo’s Evil Twin: The 0%-Club Action Era

The mid-2010s and early 2020s saw a mini-wave of low-budget action movies sliding into the 0% zone: small,
formulaic thrillers that relied on name recognition – often Bruce Willis – to sell a product that critics found
almost indistinguishable from one another. Films like Precious Cargo and Hard Kill became
shorthand for what happens when glossy posters replace real storytelling.

While each title has its own plot, they share similar sins: thin scripts, recycled locations, cut-and-paste villains,
and stars who look like they’re already mentally on vacation. This era sits just below our final entry because at
least these movies rarely pretended to be anything more than quick content for the streaming and VOD market. They’re
cynically competent in their own way – which makes them depressing more than outright fascinating.

#1. Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002)

If there were a Mount Rushmore of bad action movies, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever would be carved front and
center. Loosely based on a Game Boy Advance game, it teams Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu as dueling agents who
eventually unite against a shady tech villain. On paper, that sounds like a stylish, early-2000s spy romp. In
reality, it’s a masterclass in how not to make an action film.

Critics describe it as incoherent, joyless, and visually muddy, with action scenes that are both over-edited and
strangely dull. The plot is a maze of betrayals and flashbacks that never add up to anything emotionally satisfying.
Despite a massive budget for the time, the movie feels oddly cheap, like a sizzle reel stretched to feature length.
With its rare combination of total critical rejection, box office failure, and enduring infamy,
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever comfortably earns the crown as the worst 0%-rated action movie of them all.

What Watching These 0% Action Movies Actually Feels Like

So what’s it like to actually sit through a marathon of these 0% action movies? Viewers who try it quickly discover
that “bad” comes in different flavors. Some of these films are dull and gray, the kind that make you check your
phone every five minutes. Others are gloriously misguided, serving up baffling creative choices that practically
demand group commentary, popcorn, and a running joke counter.

You start with a movie like A Low Down Dirty Shame or Redline and think, “Okay, this is rough, but
I’ve seen worse.” The pacing is off, the dialogue is clunky, but you can still latch onto a performance, a song, or
a single action beat. These are the entries that feel like they could have been decent with a stronger script and a
little more time in the editing room.

As you move deeper into the list, the experience changes. With Dark Tide and Max Steel, you might
start to feel a very specific kind of frustration: everything looks “fine,” yet the emotional core is missing.
You’re watching hard-working casts and crews pour energy into projects that never quite figure out what they’re
trying to be. It’s not so much fun-bad as it is oddly melancholy.

By the time you reach The Last Days of American Crime, the marathon becomes an endurance sport. Long, grim,
and self-serious, movies like this test your patience. The violence loses impact, the plotting blends together, and
you’re left wondering how a story with such a bold premise could end up feeling so shapeless. You may find yourself
pausing just to walk around the room and remember that time is still moving forward in the real world.

Then, finally, there’s Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. Watching it after everything else is almost clarifying.
You’ve seen generic heists, limp shark attacks, and limp revenge stories, but this one manages to be uniquely
bewildering. Scenes that should be cool – people rappelling off buildings, shootouts in the rain, spy gadgets –
somehow feel wrong in their rhythm, like a song played just a little off-beat. It’s the moment you realize that
bad action isn’t just about low budgets or silly ideas; it’s about the way all the pieces fit together (or don’t).

The weird twist is that a 0%-movie marathon can actually deepen your appreciation for good action films. After
watching plots that go nowhere and characters that never come to life, you start noticing how much craft goes into
making a genuinely exciting car chase or a simple, clear emotional arc. You also might find a few titles you defend
out of sheer stubbornness: maybe you secretly enjoy the chaotic energy of Jaws: The Revenge, or you think
A Low Down Dirty Shame deserved at least one kind critic.

In the end, these movies are reminders that cinema is a human business. Scripts get rushed, budgets get mismanaged,
stars sign on for the wrong reasons, and marketing needs something – anything – to release. Sometimes that chaos
produces an underappreciated gem. Other times, it gifts the world a legendary disaster with a 0% score and a cult
following of people who love to hate-watch it. Either way, if you dive into this list, you’ll come out with stories,
inside jokes, and a new understanding of just how “bad to worst” the action genre can go.

Conclusion: Why The 0% Action List Matters

Every movie on this list failed in spectacular fashion, but they’re also strangely important. They map out the
outer limits of what audiences and critics will tolerate. They show that star power alone can’t save a flimsy story,
that CGI isn’t a substitute for tension, and that franchise brand names can’t patch over lazy writing forever.

For action fans, this ranking is both a warning label and a curiosity cabinet. Maybe you’ll never willingly sit
through Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, but knowing it exists – and knowing why it bombed so hard –
makes you appreciate the next genuinely good action film that much more. And if you do decide to queue up a 0%
marathon, at least now you know where to start…and which disaster to save for last.