By Take advantage of Blackwelder

Likely to idea behind remaking old movies that were not exceptional to begin with: Rather of screwing up a vintage, create a better form of a unsuccessful film. Witness, for instance, Steven Soderbergh’s smarter, snappier Rat Pack-less retread of “Ocean’s Eleven,” which got several occasions the motion picture mileage of their predecessor.

However this concept appears to become lost on flash-bang action director John McTiernan, whose vacuous, pure-noise-and-atmosphere update of 1975’s “Rollerball” — a cautionary, advanced parable of maximum sports bloodlust — is really lacking of substance it almost defies description.

Rollerball is really a ferocious team sport — part roller derby, part motocross, part World Wrestling Federation — performed in fictionalized and very corrupt Central Asian nations. The sport’s greatest star is virtuous pall-American import Jonathan Mix (Chris Klein), that has just discovered the league proprietors are rigging the games for additional violence because spilt bloodstream spells ratings for his or her TV systems.

The 2 or 3 scenes that really cope with plot find Jonathan attempting to escape (apparently the proprietors will spare no expense to scare their players from quitting) and, failing that, attempting to avoid game-time murder attempts within the Rollerball rink. While dodging dying, he leads his glossy, leather-clad teammates — who seem like rejects from “Mad Max: The Musical” — to victory in 1 hour 30 minutes of heavy metal and rock video montages, edited together by someone using the attention length of a gnat.

McTiernan takes several pages from Paul Verhoeven’s half-witted “Starship Troopers” playbook, valuing stylish, pyrotechnic stunts most of all and plying “Rollerball” with actors who either chew scenery (Jean Reno like a greedy team owner) or don’t have the depth of scenery, such as the benign Klein and model Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. She plays a scar-faced tough cookie Rollerball biker having a heart of gold.

Entire scenes serve no purpose, such as this girl dragging Klein to some dilapidated Eastern Bloc apartment building to consider somebody that is not there and it is never pointed out again. The show makes superficial attempts at dim-bulb irony (elementary “1984” allusions, etc.). The entirely arbitrary climax comes not due to a advancement of the plot but merely since the script states you’re ready to wrap some misconception. Klein’s inevitable showdown with Reno is really rudimentary it might occured whenever after he feels the need to squash the man half an hour in to the picture.

The 1975 “Rollerball” — which required devote a sterile twenty-first century when corporations have replaced countries — a minimum of had underlying omen-of-the-future styles. This version is certainly not but an exploitation of the extremely factor it proposes to condemn: virtually plotless violence as crass entertainment.

Details and Figures

Run time: 98 mins

In Theaters: Friday eighth Feb 2002

Box Office USA: $18.9M

Written by: MGM/UA Distribution Company

Contactmusic.com: one fifth

Rotten Tomato plants: 3%
Fresh: 4 Rotten: 113

Cast & Crew

Starring: Chris Klein as Jonathan Mix, LL Awesome J as Marcus Ridley, Rebecca Romijn as Aurora, Naveen Andrews as Sanjay, Jean Reno as Alexi Petrovich, Naveen Andrews as Sanjay, Oleg Taktarov as Denekin, David Hemblen as Serokin, Eugene Lipinski as Yuri Kotlev, Frank Ferrara as Assistant Gold Coach, Jesse Wright as Coach Olga, Lucia Rijker as Red Team #9

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