Rollerball (2002)

By Zentilack

Summary

An adrenaline junkie really wants to play professional hockey, but an old friend tells him that he can be a big name in a different sport. It's not long after he becomes a Rollerball star, though, that he realizes that he's playing a dangerous game.



What I Expected

I made brief mention of this remake in my review of the original Rollerball (1975). I hadn't seen this new version, and I really only stumbled onto it by accident when researching the old movie. Having been reminded of it, I vaguely remembered seeing the trailer and thinking, "Wow, this looks awfully stupid." Having realized that this new Rollerball is connected to the old one, and discovering that I actually liked the old one, my expectations were slightly raised (by about a millimeter).

The Bad

This movie sucks. I expected it to be pretty bad, but this is beyond the pale. I... I don't even know where to start.

Everything about this film is bad. I actually watched the movie about two months ago and just didn't want to think about it. I still don't, but I guess I probably ought to say something, at least.

Chris Klein plays the "hero" Jonathan Cross.  Now, I've never really cared for Klein.  He was okay in American Pie, I guess.  But here, he just doesn't seem to fit the role.  He doesn't have the charisma to make me believe that he's any sort of leader.  He doesn't have the intensity to sell the idea that he's some kind of natural at this brutal sport.  Nor does he make me think that he's got this clever, intelligent side to him.  It's like the Jonathan that he plays is this brainless goofball who might have been good on his high school football team, but couldn't possibly be a hard fighting Rollerball star. Oh, and apparently he's a former rodeo champion or something.

His character arc (if you can call it that) is not very solid.  He starts off as this guy who is a skilled athlete who just wants to make it big.  His brainlessness is put on display when he has a street-luge race through the streets of San Francisco where he's almost killed, then almost arrested.  At the same time, he seems offended that the other racer played rough with him (real tough guy, Jonathan).  When he gets into Rollerball, I think maybe they were going with the whole "he learns to be selfless" thing, but it's not really clear.  He ends up going against the owner of the game because his friends get hurt.  But he doesn't have a good, solid grounding in the game.  He just got into it, so there's real significance to the fact that he wants to get out (aside from money and fame).  He doesn't really seem to change as a person over the course of the film, he just encounters new situations.  There's nothing internal, the conflict for him is almost entirely external, and it makes his character arc really weak.

Also, why did they make Jonathan's last name "Cross" in the remake?  His name is Jonathan E. in the original.  Couldn't come up with any good "E" names, I guess.

LL Cool J plays Jonathan's friend Marcus, the guy who gets Jonathan into Rollerball in the first place.  This guy's motivations were all over the place.  At first he seems to be totally practical, just in it for the money.  Then, he gets troubled that people are getting killed in the games, apparently by sabotage, but he still wants to keep playing.  Okay.  Then he suddenly wants to get out.  Why?  I saw no clear reason for him to change his mind.  Maybe it's there, but I never saw it.  I mean, Marcus seemed to know better than Jonathan how dangerous it would be to try and escape.  You'd think his reasons for leaving would have been significant.

Rebecca Romijn-Stamos plays the tough-girl, street-smart love interest.  Why she had to be one of the players, I don't know.  Anyway, she becomes Jonathan's lover with no real warning.  Then she gets traded to another team and they have to play against each other, but they never actually play against each other.  Yeah, her change to the other team serves no real purpose, except to see her get threatened by her new teammates and have her acting fearful (totally against her previously established character).  Urgh, enough about the characters.

The music is heavy rock, and lots of it.  It's supposed to make the action more exciting but it wound up being obnoxious and silly.  Slipknot and Rob Zombie cannot carry your film.  "Boom" by P.O.D. does not make a ridiculous jumble of bad action shots look awesome.  The original Rollerball (1975) had classical music all over the place, and it was far more exciting and involving.  But it's not the music that makes these films bad or good.  They can only help or hinder what's already there.

They screwed up the actual sport of Rollerball in this movie.  I guess they were trying to make it, I don't know, extreme or some crap, but it's just stupid.  The track is now like a figure-eight, with some kind of unnecessary scaffold thing that goes over the arena (which they have to skate across).  Every time someone scores a goal they do this ridiculous sideways dive through the air.  The camera cuts all over the place and the shots are almost universally too close to the action to get a handle on what is going on.  Some shots just cut to the same shot a split second later.  In the first movie, you could legitimately tell what was happening and you knew which team had the momentum at any given moment.  Here, all you have is badly done stunts with an irritating announcer to simply tell you how the game is progressing.

Good luck with that landing.

The story is butchered.  This is supposed to be a remake of the 1975 Rollerball, but apparently nobody involved in the making of this new film knew what the heck made the original good.  There is nothing subtle, nothing deep to find here.  In the original, Jonathan was a veteran Rollerball star who wanted to keep playing the game -- partly for himself, partly to give the people watching hope of what an individual could do.  In the new one, Jonathan joins up and then spends half the movie trying to get back out.  The original dwells on elements of humanity and society, while the new one hamfistedly tries to smash those elements into "greedy businessmen."  In the old, rollerball is a sport meant to mollify the masses as they live under totalitarian rule.  In the new, it's just an extreme sport out for ratings.  I could go on, but you get the point.

But the thing that stands out to me most isn't any of these things.  I mean, yeah, all these things grated on me, but this one scene puts this movie into focus.  It shows just how little the people who made this film cared.  The thoughtless way they treated every element of the original story is vividly illustrated in this one, ridiculous, stupid sound effect (repeated twice for extra derp). [Fast-forward to 35 seconds]

I actually stopped the movie at this point, rewound, and played it again.  This was supposed to be a serious movie, right?  I was convinced that the filmmakers had not done something so dumb.  But they did.  Twice.


Mr.Tropnevad has something to say

I never could bring myself to watch this and I love bad movies. When it was released on VHS/DVD I was working in a movie store, and we had to drop the price of the used copies down to a dollar, because it would not sell. The sad thing is we had over three hundred copies and after about a year the distribution company told us to throw them away. The week it was released to rent we couldn't even rent more than fifty copies.

The Good

...

Yeah, I got nothing.

Overall Thoughts

Heinous.  This is, without a doubt, one of the worst movies I've ever seen.  There was not a moment in the film that I felt they had done something right.  I feel embarrassed for the people who worked on this.  Even without the comparison to the 1975 Rollerball, this film would have been horrible.  What makes it worse is that it was directed by John McTiernan, who did Predator, Die Hard, and The Hunt for Red October.  How did he screw this up so bad?!

Honestly, I don't know.  Apparently McTiernan has been in a legal mess for trying to have producer Charles Roven's phone wiretapped around the time Rollerball (2002) was being made. No idea if it has anything to do with anything, but there it is.

Whatever the reason for how this movie came out so awful, the fact remains: This movie is an atrocity.  Do not waste your time or money on this piece of garbage.  Watch the original, instead.