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All-Reviews.com Movie/Video Review
Rollerball
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 out of 4
Review by Susan Granger
½ star out of 4
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When Norman Jewison's original "Rollerball," starring James Caan, was
released in 1975, it combined sci-fi with social commentary, depicting a
futuristic world ruled by ruthless, all-powerful corporations that had
eliminated poverty, war and political unrest. The ultra-violent sport of
rollerball, combining roller-derby with basketball and motorcycling, was the
opiate of the masses. Directed by John McTiernan ("Die Hard"), the simplistic
new version is set at an unspecified time in an undefined central Asian country
like Kazakhstan. Players skate around a slope-sided, figure-eight track, trying
to toss metal balls into basketball-like hoops - with a motorcyclist whizzing
about. Other than that, it's incomprehensible. The game's inventor, a sinister
Slavic mobster named Alexi Petrovich (Jean Reno), has attracted athletes from
all over the world, like San Francisco daredevils Marcus Ridley (LL Cool J) and
Jonathan Cross (Chris Klein), whose testosterone soars for teammate Aurora
(Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), seen lifting weights topless. (Since it's PG-13, she's
shown only from the back.) But when these dim-witted players finally realize
that their bloody on-track "accidents" are, in fact, sabotage and they're mere
pawns in a pending North American cable TV deal, escape is their only salvation.
So much for plot. The dialogue, written by Larry Ferguson ("Maximum Risk") and
John Pogue ("The Fast and the Furious"), is trivial and trite, plus the cliché
characters are thinly drawn. Obviously, the producers were far more interested
in the stunts, choreographed by Jamie Jones and photographed by Steve Mason. On
the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Rollerball" veers off with a brutal 2. It's
a second-rate, extreme-sports, hard-rock music video.
Copyright © 2002 Susan Granger
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