Rollerball: DVD, Blu-ray Movie Review (2009)

John McTiernan's thriller is one of those movies you never quite forget--which is why, I suppose, we have psychotherapy, mood-enhancing prescription drugs and neighborhood bars to help us cope.

Based on the 1975 original starring James Caan and Maud Adams, this version is determined to overlook everything that made its inspiration so prescient. Instead of exploring why pop culture is fascinated with extreme sports, it’s only content to exploit the violence and the blood within the sport. Instead of focusing on how these sports are shaped and fueled by major corporations, it overlooks their influence in favor of featuring a string of head-banging, heavy-metal riffs.

The film stars Chris Klein as Jonathan, a fresh-faced kid from San Francisco who leaves his meaningless life in the states to become a meaningless sports star in Kazakhstan, Russia, a post-communist bloc country that’s absolutely certain its ticket to free trade rests with the game of Rollerball.

I want you to think about that for a minute--it’s a revelation that will either make you laugh or cry.

With Jean Reno as the evil Petrovich, a mustache-twirling, nouveau-capitalist who is determined to turn Rollerball into a smash success, LL Cool J as an accountant-turned-Rollerball superstar and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as a Russian minx whose performance suggests she worked for scale and a case of Stoli, "Rollerball" takes its place beside "Battlefield Earth" as one of the worst movies Hollywood has shucked out in years.

As "Roller Boogie" is my witness, they don't make them any worse than this.

Rated R. Grade: F