It begins at dawn's first light with a nice quiet distant hilltop silhouette of bikers, a van, a pantomimed conference of some sort. This is the last nice thing in the movie. Even if the ensuing scene of two young daredevils in a luge-on-wheels race down the streets of San Francisco could be seen as a good idea, the heavy-metal accompaniment to it could not also be seen as good -- not if the filmmaker wants to retain the status of an observer in preference to that of an all-out accomplice, a panderer to the youth crowd, a Nike-licker. It especially can't be seen as a good idea if the filmmaker entertains pretensions as an above-it-all commentator on the exploitation of violence by crass capitalists. The original Rollerball of 1975 was perfectly awful science fiction, although events in the interim might seem to have strengthened its credentials as a crystal ball: one thinks of the TV-driven phenomena of the X Games, the XFL, the WWF, etc., not to mention such contrived "reality" shows as Survivor and Fear Factor. But then again, the original, despite positing a far-off world without war, was not so much looking to the future as to the contemporary reality of roller derby. (To which, whatever happened?) That connection is now lost, so that John McTiernan's remake seems to concern itself less with an unforeseen future than with a forgotten past. The insignificant fact that the movie identifies with the exploited and manipulated hero (Chris Klein, groomed as a new Keanu Reeves) instead of with the exploitive and manipulative Mr. Money Bags (Jean Reno, a goddam furriner) only shows that Hollywood knows on which side its bread is buttered. The mass audience wants to identify with an action hero, not with an artist in a chair. And at least to the extent of his exploitation and manipulation, the identification is no problem. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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