The reputation of this film really goes before it. It was of course a remake of the 1975 original and it almost goes without saying that it is also vastly inferior. Most remakes are worse of course but this one really misses the mark quite spectacularly. What is so surprising is that it's the action scenes themselves that are possibly the most poorly executed. Director John McTiernan had been most famous for making classics of the action genre in Predator (1987) and Die Hard (1988), which makes it so doubly surprising that his action scenes in Rollerball are so poor. The game of Rollerball itself should be pretty simple but in this movie it can barely be followed nor understood. For the remake the arena has pointlessly being changed into a figure of eight shaped track that looks less like a place of futuristic violent sports combat and more like the set from the 90's game-show Gladiators. The action is fast, furious, yet incomprehensible, edited together in ways that do not help us know what the hell is going on.The story-line underpinning events is broadly similar to the original but with poor performances and a weak script. You never get very involved with the plight of the characters and it's quite difficult believing that this is the number one sport in the world of the future. Unlike the original, the events only occur two or three years in the future, meaning that the dystopian sci-fi of the original is lost and we have a drearier contemporary world in which events unfold. Although it was quite an unusual idea setting the action in Kazakhstan of all places! To be fair to the film, it does move at a decent pace and is entertaining enough if you lower your expectations accordingly. If it wasn't a remake of a cult classic I daresay it would have passed under the radar as a ropey action movie but seeing as it is a new version of an old film and one with quite a considerable budget its flaws become all too apparent.

There was me thinking John McTiernan knew what he was up to.This film is a mess.The story is familiar and clichéd but, even so, the telling of it is muddled.Rollerball itself, potentially exciting, is hopelessly confusing and pointless.The script is slightly less useful than waste paper.Rebecca Romijn-Stamos looks good.Chris Klein, looking very like Keanu Reeves, proves to be a good deal less expressive. The lad has shown himself to be tolerable in an ensemble piece, but he can't carry an action movie on his own due to a complete absence of charisma.Poor.

OK IMDb junkies, if you've read any of my reviews at this point you should notice that I enjoy "bad" or b-movies. Rarely, and I mean Catwoman rarely do I turn off the DVD player. But when I saw this film, well lets just say I began to contemplate the afterlife. It all comes down to one scene, a battery of nonsense imagery set to noises that clearly lack any true direction. I seem to remember an alarm clock, a rooster crow, a ninja "heeee-yaa" and bowling pins being hit, followed by a reporter asking LL Cool J if his mother was a crack head. I immediately began slapping myself in the face, asking if what I had seen was real, or whether I had eaten the wrong pill and found myself in the 'real' world where God-awful films like this actually get the go ahead and budget to be produced, shot, and released to the public.

because it's missing something. The biggest flaw is Chris Klein, he is the most bland actor that I have ever seen. How does a pretty boy like him survive in a bloody, winner take all game like Rollerball? More than that, he doesn't have the charisma to lead a movie. Adding to the problem is that there isn't enough going on in this movie aside from distracting night vision scenes. There isn't any of the social commentary that the original had or the tense action scenes, it fails on both fronts. The only solace is some of the cast: Jean Reno, Ice Cube, and Rebecca Romijn. Ice Cube would have made a better lead and a much more believable Rollerballer with his body. But, as is, This is mess that is best forgotten.