Product: Rollerball (2002)
Rating: 1.0
Mc Tiernan's BLUNDERBALL - pitiful and useless...
With this movie, the intention of John McTiernan, a director yet known for his great effectiveness (remember "Predator", "Die Hard 1 & 3", "The Hunt for Red October", "The 13th Warrior"), was attack the worlds of medias and reality-shows in the U.S. But he completely fails. His film, the second in his career 'remade' from Norman Jewison - after "Thomas Crown" - actually uses all the fashioned cliches of American action movies: all the scenes were shot and edited at 100 mph, in the MTV style (the musical background is unstandable). We have the impression to deal with a "Fast and Furious" on skates. The story doesn't have any slice of interest, and the too cool acting (especially LL Cool J's - 'Close your eyes and take the dough!') and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos disastrous Russian accent don't arrange anything. But what may be really shocking in this film is the presence of a woman in the games, which is really unacceptable when you see the great violence of this sport, mixing football, baseball, boxing and ice hockey, and where (maybe for the beauty of the show...) almost no blow is forbidden. There is no woman football or ice hockey league (so far...), but you can see a woman playing rollerball... look for the mistake! And McTiernan definitely turned his movie to politically correct, by locating the rollerball games in a poor country in central Asia.Add to it this French actor, Jean Reno, who absolutely doesn't belong in here and ridiculizes himself more than anything else and you have a zero movie, one of the worse ever directed by McTiernan, maybe his worst, along with "Medicine Man". The advice I could give McTiernan is try to be more personal and independent, and to write screenplays of his own. What are the use and interest spending so much dough to produce things like this? The film was a big box-office failure and it's not surprising. A terrifying blunder. (Re)Watch 1975 Norman Jewison great classic instead.