Some movies should never have been made, and high on that list is the addled new remake of “Rollerball” — which was supposed to have been released last year but was held back for extensive re-editing.
Set in the near future, and drawing its plot vaguely from Norman Jewison’s 1975 sci-fi sports thriller about a futuristic roller derby, this is a movie that’s bewilderingly bad. The fact that most of it is so well made technically, by crackerjack action producer-director John McTiernan (“Die Hard”), makes the whole thing even more stupefying. What in the world were all these people thinking? Did they really believe the world needed a second “Rollerball,” set in Kazakhstan and decked out with a heavy-metal sound track and a Russian master-villain played by Frenchman Jean Reno? Did they think the world’s movie audiences were breathlessly awaiting a whole new Rollerball game layout, plus Chris Klein, the jock candidate of “Election,” inadequately filling ’75 star Jimmy Caan’s old shoes and skates?
The 1975 “Rollerball” was hardly a classic. Indeed my own memories of it — which proved overly harsh when I recently watched it again — were of a big, sterile sci-fi epic. But that “Rollerball” was a cinematic masterpiece next to this one. McTiernan’s remake has no interesting characters or ideas, no style or substance and no intriguing contemporary riffs. Even worse, it mostly lacks McTiernan’s specialty: great razzle-dazzle action scenes. Despite strenuous rock ’em sock ’em attempts by everybody involved to rev things up to the max, 2002’s “Rollerball” never takes off. It’s dull, spiritless, silly and monotonous: an ultra-loud blast of pointless mayhem, going nowhere fast. By contrast, Jewison’s ’75 “Rollerball” began with irony and classicism: that scene of a huge, elegantly designed Rollerball stadium filling up to the strains of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.” Times have changed. Instead of Bach, this movie fills our ears and heads with Rob Zombie’s “Feels So Numb” and Slipknot’s “I Am Hated,” both of which are better than the scenes they accompany.
The new story is a head-banger too. Unlike the earlier “Rollerball” — adapted by scenarist William Harrison from his short story — this film isn’t a cautionary dystopian tale of a future worldwide corporate tyranny, where violence and dissent have been eradicated and Rollerball stars like James Caan’s Jonathan E. serve as outlets for public hostility and pawns of the oligarchy. Instead, it’s a cartoonish dig at modern TV sports violence, supposedly set a few years in the future. In it, Russian ex-KGB entrepreneur Petrovich (Reno), backed up by his evil crony Sanjay (Naveen Andrews), stages bloody Rollerball games in Kazakhstan and broadcasts them to a violence-crazed world audience.
When we first meet this movie’s Jonathan — Klein as Jonathan Cross — he’s engaged in an idiotic if exciting outlaw skateboard race on San Francisco’s hilly streets: a scene that looks like “Bullitt” crossed with “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” (Unfortunately, this is as good as the movie’s action gets.) Chased by the cops and improbably rescued in mid-run by his old buddy Marcus Ridley (LL Cool J), hockey whiz Jonathan is quickly persuaded to emigrate from America, giving up a possible NHL career (as the “next Wayne Gretzky,” no less) for the overseas Rollerball league. In an incredibly brief time, he becomes the sport’s superstar.
Think about it: The next Wayne Gretzky lighting out for Kazakhstan and a life in the brutalized, collapsing ex-Soviet economy, among mad tycoons and exploited athletes! If you find that hard to swallow, you’ll also have problems with the Rollerball stadium itself: a diminutive arena, with a serpentine track that looks like the mechanized equivalent of a skateboard slope in hell. And however much you like suave giant Reno, you’ll be dumbstruck by his character Petrovich: a murderous nabob who spends much of the movie screaming robustly or leering at his cohorts while unleashing waves of contrived violence against unsuspecting athletes.
The movie has more whoppers. LL Cool J’s Marcus is supposed to have left a lucrative career in finance to manage this grungy team. Blond supermodel Rebecca Romijn-Stamos — who usually looks good anywhere — here strains credulity as Aurora, a scar-faced, black-haired, tattooed Rollerball player with feral eyes, with whom Jonathan carries on a clandestine affair in deserted factories and tenements. There we hear the movie’s one passable line: “Why don’t we try this with sheets some time?”
The movie has rioting mobs, shrieking TV announcers, automatic TV ratings monitors that zoom upward whenever blood flows and a lot of garishly costumed Rollerballers who look like invading armies of “Star Wars” rejects. And there’s also a completely unsatisfying slam-bang ending, staged, for some reason, not on the Rollerball track but in somebody’s office.
“Rollerball” is the second Norman Jewison movie in a row that McTiernan has remade — the first was 1999’s good looking heist thriller “The Thomas Crown Affair” — and all I can say is: I hope he never gets around to “Fiddler on the Roof.” (I see Jack Black as Tevye and Queen Latifah as the matchmaker.) I can’t think of a single good reason to watch “Rollerball.” It suggests a real bankruptcy in the way contemporary Hollywood picks its projects: with the moviemakers frantically perusing and looting videos of old movies, TV shows and cartoons in their endless quest for well-worn ideas to exploit.
The first “Rollerball” was very much a movie of its time: a portrayal of the paranoia of the ’70s projected into an imaginary future. The new “Rollerball” is a portrayal of rampaging greed projected into an imaginary Asia, concocted with an opportunism that suggests that, if the movie fails, some of the moviemakers might be willing to open up a Rollerball track somewhere. I see Kazakhstan.
`Rollerball’
(star)1/2
Directed by John McTiernan; written by Larry Ferguson & John Pogue, based on the story and screenplay by William Harrison; photographed by Steve Mason; edited by John Wright; production designed by Norman Garwood, Dennis Bradford; music by Eric Serra; produced by Charles Roven, Beau St. Clair, McTiernan. An MGM Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:38. MPAA rating: PG-13 (violence, extreme sports action, sensuality, language and some drug references).
Jonathan Cross ………….. Chris Klein
Petrovich ………………. Jean Reno
Marcus Ridley …………… LL Cool J
Aurora …………………. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos
Sanjay …………………. Naveen Andrews
Denekin ………………… Oleg Taktarov
