Review: Rollerball
Image a happy little puppy walking down the street. As he walks along, he thinks of very happy puppy thoughts. Maybe the dog he sniffed while walking down this street, or maybe about the “present” he is going to leave in a certain someone’s dorm room later tonight. The happy little puppy tries to cross the street and…BAM! he is plowed by a two ton truck that reduces his body to a splattered mess all over the road. Bits and pieces are everywhere, and even if you tried, there would be no possible way to construct this tangled mess of entrails into what we would consider a small animal. This relates directly to a new mess I have discovered, it goes by the name Rollerball, and no matter how much of this contraption is left, you could never reconstruct it into anything we would consider a movie.
Little to the players knowledge, but extremely evident to the common whore, when you do something over and over, it becomes very boring (see: NBA). So the producers of the sport, and their cohorts trying to lock in a key airing in North America, rig the game to have someone brutally injured or killed in every match. I don’t know about the players, but after the second player in as many days got screwed up, I would be getting the fuck out of there. Which is exactly what the films leading characters try to do, but seeing as they are tough Rollerball champions, they decide to escape in an ice cream truck with a motorcycle keenly placed in the back. If I were them, I would grab and Bomb-pop and say “Bring it on!”
The biggest problem, is this movie could have been cool if not for the massive editing done to bring it down to a PG-13 rating. Cut away shots, incomplete sentences, and a very obviously blurred sauna scene are so blatantly obvious, a three year old on a iMac could have made a better movie fit together.
The film stars LL Cool J and Chris Klein as two Rollerball greats who are looking for fast cars, faster money, and even faster women. LL gets all three, but Chris has to settle for just two, as his woman, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, works out in the nude and has a nasty gash above her eye. Knowing the other women in the film, one might think she became critically injured when going for some stick (wink, wink).
Looking back at the track record for the actors and crew, you wonder where in the hell this move came from. John McTiernan directed Die Hard for god sakes. I won’t say that Chris Klein is a good actor, but the very least he had some moments in American Pie, American Pie 2, and maybe Say it Isn’t So. LL Cool J was damn cool in Deep Blue Sea, but any acting career these people hope to have in the future won’t be based on the tagline, “Rollerball’s Chris Klein” or “From the director of Rollerball” because I am turning the opposite way, and running like hell.
In any event, with the low box office numbers garnered by this piece of trash, maybe not enough people will be affected by it, but all I can say is I have been severely traumatized, and Rollerball has shown movies a new low.
