Henry Bean, director of "The Believer", complained recently about the dearth of politics in American cinema. Few recent听Hollywood movies prove his point more than John McTiernan's mind-numbingly awful riff on the 1975 action pic "Rollerball".
Crass and utterly incomprehensible, this new "Rollerball" does away with the original's political backdrop, turns the volume up to 11, and makes like it was written and directed by a middle-aged version of Beavis and Butt-head. Did the film makers really听believe including a few seconds' worth of Slipknot would be enough to fool anyone into听thinking that this was a cool movie?
Just to show how bad things have got in the years since Norman Jewison's controversial original, instead of a macho hard man like James Caan we now get Chris Klein - an actor who usually plays sweet-natured airheads in comedies such as "American Pie" - as the film's hero. Klein's Jonathan Cross is a skateboarder who joins the rollerball circuit in Central Asia and gradually finds himself at odds with the league's money-hungry owner (Reno).
Or something like that. Frankly, you'll realize a few minutes into this farrago that trying to follow the 'plot' is futile.
So what of the rollerball matches - surely McTiernan must have got at least them right? Well, no. Like the rest of the movie, they are a mess.
A risible cross between WWF wrestling and a roller derby, they are shot and edited for maximum impact and minimum sense. When the commentator screams, "What is this s***?",听it's hard not to ask the same question yourself.
If you only see one "Rollerball" this year, make sure it's the original. They don't make 'em like they used to, they really don't.
Rollerball (2002)
