onathan Cross (Klein) can't get a gig with a professional sports team, so he makes money by taking part in illegal street luge races on the hills of his hometown of San Francisco. High-school buddy Marcus Ridley (LL Cool J) tells him that opportunity awaits elsewhere. There's this hot new professional sport called Rollerball, and it's hiring.
There's a catch. The teams are based in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. Jonathan declines. At least until he realizes that the police are closing in, and he has nowhere else to turn.
Flash forward four months. On the twisting track of the Rollerball arena, Jonathan is no longer a loser. He's a megastar, the hero to crowds of miners who spend their last tenge to bet on their favorite team, Jonathan's Horsemen. Jonathan is a natural at the extreme sport, a combination of motocross, roller derby and hockey.
His prowess in the arena has won him the favor of Petrovich (Reno), the creator and owner of Rollerball, who is trying to expand the sport through several impending deals for cable television rights. Jonathan is also a favorite among his teammates, who include former miner Denekin (Oleg Taktarov) and the mysterious Aurora (Romijn-Stamos).
But Rollerball is not a game for the timid. During one particularly brutal match with the Golden Horde, a teammate gets his helmet knocked off and is smashed in the face by the metal ball. Interestingly, the ratings for the game spike during the accident.
After the game, Denekin tells Jonathan he doesn't think the injury was inadvertent. "What if it wasn't an accident?" he asks. Jonathan takes the concern to Petrovich, who assures him that things will be taken care of.
Later, Jonathan confides in Aurora, with whom he is having a secret affair. She scoffs at his naivete. "They knew," she says. Ridley also tells Jonathan not to make waves. Just play the game, take the money and retire young.
Through subsequent games, Jonathan's fears grow. But can he find the will to challenge the increasingly erratic Petrovich? And if things turn bad, can he escape?
A game that's over before it even begins
Rollerball is the troubled production based on Norman Jewison's 1975 cult-classic SF film of the same name. This version, from Die Hard director McTiernan, had its release date delayed after a disastrous preview screening, as well as shooting additional footage and trimming the movie to change its rating to PG-13 from R.
The result is a misbegotten exercise that fails on almost every level. The movie is such a mess that it's difficult to see what McTiernan and the writers, Ferguson and Pogue, were aiming for or why they felt compelled to update the original film in the first place.
The original Rollerball, starring James Caan as Jonathan E, was a parable set in a futuristic society in which the ruling corporations created a lethal professional sport as a palliative for the masses to demonstrate the futility of individual effort. Though overly ponderous, it at least had the virtue of being thoughtful, and the central sport itself was a thrilling creation that captured the imagination.
For whatever reason, McTiernan chose to discard all but the basic premise of the original film. His Rollerball appears less interested in critiquing society than in exploiting the current trends of extreme sports and professional wrestling to titillate its intended adolescent male audience.
Which is all good. Except that the film squanders its main attraction: the game itself. In the original film, the game was a model of purity: skaters and bikers on a round track, a speeding metal ball and bone-crunching competition to get the ball into a goal. McTiernan's Rollerball takes place on a track that resembles a gerbil maze, with players costumed like performers from an S&M Cirque Du Soleil. The director shoots with dozens of moving cameras attached to skates, helmets, cranes and bikes, and the editing is so abrupt that any sense of fluidity or continuity is utterly lost. McTiernan also intercuts each game with dialogue sequences, vitiating suspense and excitement.
As for the rest of the movie? Its main message seems to be that our hero finds himself shocked! Shocked! To discover that professional sports can be violent and are really all about money. Oh, and the dialogue, acting, costumes, sets and the rest are so bad the filmmakers should have been sent to the penalty box for cross-checking the audience.
