High-Speed Hypocrisy

By Steven N. Jacobs

Contributing Writer

Rollerball, directed by John McTiernan of Die Hard fame, skates into theaters today. Starring Chris Klein (the American Pie movies), LL Cool J (Toys, Any Given Sunday), Jean Reno (The Professional , Ronin) and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (X-Men, Dirty Work), this film depicts a future in which corporations, instead of countries, govern the people of the world. The story focuses on an extremely popular sport called Rollerball— created by executives in order to avert attention from their tyrannical control over the general populace, the show gradually becomes more and more violent as the man in charge, Alexis Petrovich (Reno), realizes that more violence means higher ratings, which, of course, means both more money and less attention paid towards the “government.” Together, Jonathan Cross (Klein), Marcus Ridley (LLCoolJ) and Aurora (Romijn-Stamos), all major players in the game, discover this plot and hilarity ensues. At least that’s what I predict.

Unbeknownst to many, this film is actually a remake and according to Norman Jewison, the director of the original Rollerball, not a very good one. In comparison to the original, which was released in 1975 and starred James Caan (The Godfather ), this new version is far more violent and, as a result, far less meaningful. According to Jewison, the film is meant to condemn violence and the actions of the corporate world, yet the new Rollerball, as he says, “[embraces] the violence [that] I used in the original to comment on the activities of multinational corporations.” The previews of this new rendition make the violence the focus, using it as a means to attract moviegoers, the very same tactic used by the “bad guys” in the movie. Perhaps McTiernan intends it this way to make some commentary about contemporary moviegoers as well as large corporations, to point out our own mindless magnetic attraction to action films while we ignore the important issues of the world. On the other hand, there is the more likely possibility that this action film director has made himself a loud and violent film that effectively turns him and the film’s production companies into the very corporate entities that this film was meant to vilify.

film

Rollerball

Directed by John McTiernan

Starring Chris Klein, LL Cool J

MGM Pictures