Product: Rollerball (2002)
Rating: 2.0
Taking Arrogance TO THE EXTREME!
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has a fascinating career slump, dating the origins of its downfall for many years. The company used to be the king of producing movies, or at least it and Warner Bros. saw eye-to-eye, but the trouble began once Ted Turner bought the majority of the MGM library in the mid-1980s. And then in the mid-90s, MGM started heading down the quality crapper with the release of "Showgirls", a movie I personally thought was enjoyable but I had to acknowledge the critical lashing the film had. From then on, it kept a consistent record of producing below-average movies, with very few non-UA movies worth praising; not even the recent James Bond movies (sans "Casino Royale") helped them with their downward slope. As of now, the once-roaring studio is in financial trouble and in danger of being bankrupt (despite being sold to multiple companies), so what films did it accomplish in recent years? "Soul Plane", "College", "The Mod Squad", "Sleep Over", "Good Boy", "Jiminy Glick in Lalawood", "Fame" remake...and this movie, "Rollerball". What can I say, at least they had "Barbershop".I'm on the defense to say this isn'tthe worst of the worst, but if this movie expected for me to accept a dystopian world where corrupt businessmen are using this sport as a global-televised sensation, then it had another thing coming. It's glorified roller derby, for goodness sake, and the way it was set-up is impractical. This sport had a pretty small field of play, no bigger than a regular skating rink. Since many players had to fill in the stage, it would be pretty cluttered to watch and to experience, and this sport is suppose to include skateboarders AND motorcyclists. Do you know how crazy is it to ride a motorcycle in a small area surrounded by other players? There's no way one can drive fast and maneuver around the field without running over the majority of players; although logic like that seem dismissible in this film since one biker manage to run over a player and he didn't get seriously injured. And what are the rules of this game, besides hitting a metal ball at a goalpost? The film's final act decided not to have any rules, but I didn't know what the rules were to begin with; the chubby announcer in the film hadn't any idea what to make of this sport either.Even if I'm just humoring the premise, I can't deal with the film taking obnoxious lengths to be edgy. For this movie to be edgy, every character has to be cocky and insulting each other (this is par for every sport, though), they have to wear spikes and other ridiculous get-ups (with the girls wearing dominatrix attire), the largely heavy metal soundtrack had to blast Slipknot and Rob Zombie whenever it can, and there has to be lots of jump cuts whenever the action occurs. It tried too hard to be extreme that the film reached the point of pretentiousness.And then there's the plot, which has "The Running Man" written all over it. Chris Klein is the lead hot-shot, LL Cool J is the black partner, and Rebecca Romijn is the fanservice; they're part of an elite team of the popular sport, which is controlled by Jean Reno, and once they know how corrupt the sport is, they planned to fight their way out. The lack of any exposition is what nearly destroyed this movie. Somehow, everyone knows what's going on and where to go at particular moments without being told, so a lot of events just happened out of change. There's too many characters and the film didn't bother to establish most of them, and often times it pulled random conveniences out of its edgy behind (i.e., how that one character manages to steal the locker key off of some other character without showing it).The convoluted, inexplicable plot and the obnoxious hardcore attitude about itself made "Rollerball" almost unenjoyable. I say 'almost', because I admit in enjoying the climax of the film, which had some tension and it wasn't boring (plus, I have a thing foruprisingconclusions); plus, the whole desert sequence shot in night-vision was certainly new, if a bit of an odd design choice. But there are better movies out there follow this kind of dangerous premise and it's best to see those instead, like"Death Race".