Rollerball looks like a checklist shaped by a 15-year-old mallrat: thrashing metal track, skateboards, motorbikes, cracked heads and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos with her top off.
Rollerball (2002)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:115
Fresh:4
Rotten:111
Average Rating:2.5/10
Consensus: Removing the social critique of the original, this updated version of Rollerball is violent, confusing, and choppy. Klein makes for a bland hero.
Runtime: 3 hrs 14 mins
Genre: Action/Adventure
Synopsis: It's the year 2005; the new sport of Rollerball is hugely popular in the unstable, ex-Soviet republics of South Asia. Marcus Ridley (LL Cool J) invites NHL-hopeful Jonathan Cross (Chris Klein) to... It's the year 2005; the new sport of Rollerball is hugely popular in the unstable, ex-Soviet republics of South Asia. Marcus Ridley (LL Cool J) invites NHL-hopeful Jonathan Cross (Chris Klein) to join him playing for the Zhambel Horsemen, in Kazahkstan. The highly paid Marcus and Jonathon are teamed with low-paid locals, who are routinely severely injured in the game, which is an extraordinarily violent extension of roller derby involving motorcycles, a metal ball, and many trappings of the World Wrestling Federation. Soon the team's star and the darling of promoter Alexi Petrovich (Jean Reno), Jonathan, is thrilled by the high-octane sport, the hype, the sports cars, and female team mate Aurora (a glowering, scar-faced Rebecca Romijm-Stamos). But gradually Jonathan discovers that the cynical Alexi and his opportunistic assistant Sanjay (Naveen Andrews) will go to any lengths to manipulate the game in order to provide an evermore gory spectacle and improve the game's television ratings. Director John McTiernan's movie is grungy and even more violent than the original 1975 ROLLERBALL. He conveys the visceral nature of the game with sharply edited action sequences and a goosed-up soundtrack, and then he shows the volatile game convulsively spinning out of control and causing social upheaval. [More]
Starring: Chris Klein, LL Cool J, Jean Reno, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos
Starring: Chris Klein, LL Cool J, Jean Reno, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Naveen, Andrew Bryniarski
Director: John McTiernan
Director: John McTiernan
Screenwriter: John Pogue, Larry Ferguson
Producer: Charles Roven, Beau St. Clair, John McTiernan
Composer: Eric Serra
Studio: MGM/UA
Reviews for Rollerball
Such an incomprehensible mess that it feels less like bad cinema than like being stuck in a dark pit having a nightmare about bad cinema.
How this otherwise talented crew managed to make a film that feels this amateurishly low-budget is anyone's guess.
This is a terrible big-budget fiasco with a go nowhere plot and terrible cast.
The French accents go from Canadian to European within a sentence, and that's only from the ones I could pick up. Who knows what other languages were massacred in the process?
This film was long-delayed and much altered in post-production and it shows.
Although Norman Jewison's stolidly grim and ultimately ludicrous 1975 original was hardly a landmark of nightmarish sci-fi, it towers over this.
This remake exists for no clear reason at all. It doesn’t even make sense and the action is dull and repetitive.
Rollerball is rigged to play as a critique of the corporate media's ruthlessly sensational tactics (overseas, that is), but even a junior-high hockey goalie could recognize it as a cheesy product of such sensationalism itself.
...tries to work in some high and mighty social commentary, and this is where it fails completely.
An own-goal fest that will have you asleep in your seat by half time.
Pushes the Hollywood action movie to stratospheric new levels of incoherence.
Despite delivering a sexy Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, this 5-mph trainwreck is a badly executed attempt at action that can't even be relied upon to deliver mindless and gratuitous violence.
Latest News for Rollerball
October 31, 2006:
RTIndie: Can Indie Studios Survive Without Big Studio Backing?
With the sale of independent-minded ThinkFilm last week, can indie film distributors survive without big studio backing? More...
July 15, 2005:
LL Cool J Finds a Multi-Pic Home at Lions Gate
The Hollywood Reporter brings news of a deal between actor/rapper LL Cool J and Lions Gate Films. Although the exact numbers have not been released, Mr. J (born as: James Todd... More...
July 11, 2005:
Pogue Pens Remake of a French Fright Flick
Screenwriter John Pogue has sold his pitch for a remake of the 2002 French horror film "Malefique" to Paramount, says Variety. Producer Neal Moritz... More...
June 05, 2001:
Romijn-Stamos, cast as the scarred Aurora the day before production started, had to learn to ride a hog. Fast. ![]()
More...
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