Product: Rollerball (2002)
Rating: 1.0
Appallingly Bad
Sports fans probably remember Fox Sports Net's series of commercials a year or two ago, advertising the new "Regional Sports Reports". These spots featured absurd imaginary sports being played in some dry and dusty location which looked vaguely Central Asian. The tag line was, "sports news from the only region you care about --- yours."This new version of Rollerball looks like it was taken from one of those FSN commercials. Gone is the SF storyline of the original story. Rather than set the story in the future, the film makers transposed it to Central Asia in the present day, post-Soviet world.The game vaguely resembles the original Rollerball, but is so hastily edited and poorly choreographed that nothing of what made the original game so compelling remains. It's just blow stuff up. Instead of drama, you get bashed in faces. In fact, although there's plenty of mindless action, there's actually less game footage than in the original... and less action.Jean Reno delivers a terrible performance as the capitalist mogul who is (gasp!) deliberately cranking up the violence in the game for (gasp!) higher ratings. With the wretched script he's given, he could hardly be expected to fill the shoes of the role played by John Houseman, the icy corporate chief of the original.As for Chris Klein... Granted, he doesn't have much of a script to work with, but I still found his performance annoying. I've seen him do better work ("Election") but he doesn't project the kind of screen presence James Caan did in the original.Curiously, although the script dispenses with the science fiction background, it does have men and women playing on the same team, and showering in co-ed locker rooms. I seriously doubt there is a culture anywhere on Earth today where men and women would participate in full contact sports together, let alone get undressed in the same locker room. There would have to be some very intense social upheaval to make that happen, particularly in Central Asia, which is a fairly conservative part of the world.If you thought "Replicant" was a great movie, then you might like this one; but frankly, folks, Chris Klein's performance makes Jean Claude van Damme look like Olivier. In fact even "Replicant" is mildly more interesting than this new "Rollerball". At least van Damme can do the splits.