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Blistering performances.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

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 are bad films...... and then there are films like Rollerball. I'm still trying to figure out why someone thought that this would be a good idea.The acting is "meh" at the best of times, the script is bizarre and who in their right mind thought Rebecca Romijn would pull off a fake Dutch accent?... and a ten minute sequence filmed with a NightVision filter? It could have worked if it had been filmed in first-person, but the angles make it illogical at best. It's like The Fast and the Furious had a kid with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome... and it had a severe mental disability. The only reason this gets a 1-star rating is because it is impossible to give it a 0-star rating.

At first Roller Ball seemed like a super-violent grudge and sports movie, and nothing more. Just violence, a little sex and no redeeming value. At times I thought it was designed to invoke rage for rage's sake, with the dreaded other. Well, I watched it to the end and I think it is worth watching. If you like heavy metal music, like tough sports and don't mind some violence you'll like the movieRoller Ball is a parable for much of modern life, from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan to professional sports. From police brutality to labor exploitation. Yes there is something more, it isn't pretty, its wonderful. It seems designed to reach an audience with a message that probably wouldn't be open to it otherwise. The audience that might most gravitate to the message, isn't the one that will watch the movie to the end because it is harsh. In its own way it might even be considered uplifting.

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.