Sometimes, films are unjustly judged. Other times, popular opinion needs to be challenged. Either way, our review of Rollerball will almost definitely be Unpopularity Content.
When it comes to pointless movie remakes, 2002’s Rollerball deserves to rank pretty highly. It’s one of the most notorious movies in existence, failing to even remotely recapture the success of the original. It’s considered a thoroughly bungled attempt at updating a classic, but is it really all that bad?
The film stars Chris Klein as Jonathan Cross, who joins a rising new sport at the behest of his friend Marcus Ridley (LL Cool J). Moving to an isolated mining community in Kazakhstan, Jonathan finds himself the poster boy of ambitious promoter Alexi Petrovich (Jean Reno). After falling in love with his local teammate Aurora (Rebecca Romijn), Jonathan begins to understand that the sport is actually filled with corruption and danger. It’s a remake that mutes the political overtones of the original, opting instead for more action and a greater focus on the fictional sport itself.
To watch this film from the perspective of someone with no first-hand knowledge of the original is interesting. With no emotional attachment to the reportedly superior original movie, the 2002 remake is an odd beast. It encapsulates the endless pursuit of edginess that pervaded the ’90s and early ’00s, desperately hoping to make a fictional sport seem cool (while also trying to make it make sense, which is no easy task in itself).
Rollerball Is Misguided Hollywood Excess… And It’s Oddly Compelling
The shortcomings of the film are well-documented. There are huge issues with its pace and narrative, it’s edited in a jarringly choppy manner, and its hero is about as vanilla as they come. The writing might be poor, but Rollerball is a weird and wonderful slice of cinema, despite its terrible overall quality.
We’ve all encountered things that are so bad they’re good, and Rollerball occasionally manages to pass over that threshold. The titular sport is hopelessly convoluted and relentlessly dramatized to no real avail, but the sheer spectacle of its action sequences is something to behold. The over-the-top soundtrack, costumes, and nature of its ridiculous story all come together to make Rollerball oddly compelling, despite the fact that it’s essentially little more than a hot mess.
Is it a good film? No. But is it entertaining? You bet. It’s utter nonsense from start to finish, but it’s cheesy schlock that’s actually laughable enough to come back around to some semblance of quality.
Rating: 35%
Summary: The Rollerball remake tries so hard to be cool and edgy that it forgets it also needs to be good. Thankfully, somewhere in the sheer insanity of it all, it manages by some miracle to entertain anyway.
Highlight: An extended action scene being shot entirely in shaky night vision is one of the weirdest directorial choices in this utterly ludicrous film, and it’s inadvertently hilarious. A serious highlight would possibly be the film’s cameos from Slipknot, Pink, and various other icons of the early ’00s.