Review – Rollerball (2002)

Is it possible to be disappointed in a movie that you didn’t have many expectations for to begin with? It isn’t that this is a bad movie. In fact, for a brain-dead action flick it isn’t exactly the worst I’ve ever seen. The problem is the original. As heavy-handed and dated as the seventies version was, it still had more going for it than the remake. For openers, the first version featured a sport that was kind of a cross between football and the Roman Arena. Teams fought for the pride of their corporation-controlled city states sometime in the nebulous future. Sure, it turned into a lot of preachy crap about the individual against the state, but somehow it at least managed to seem important. In the new version, the contest appears to be a jump-cut blend of roller derby and professional wrestling. Contests take place mostly in former Soviet republics, and they’ve no apparent significance to anyone besides gamblers and the participants themselves. And though the ads for the DVD plugged a version “too hot for theaters,” I didn’t see much that struck me as too hot for anything (except perhaps for the living rooms of folks who can’t bear bare breasts, and not all that many of ‘em either). If they’d just stuck with the original story and re-shot it with more up-to-date sex, violence and special effects, they’d have come up with a much more entertaining movie. Mildly amusing