Time approximation: 98 minutes ('Dang', I said, 'That was freaking fast'.).

Cast: Chris Klein, Jean Reno, LL Cool J, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Oleg Taktarov, Naveen Andrews

Director: John McTiernan.

Written by Larry Ferguson, John Pogue

Studio: MGM

I wish I could get my boyfriend to shut the heck up about Hardboiled. But I can't. I mean, here I am sitting on my futon, black ballpoint in my hand, notebook balanced precariously on my knee, phone on my left ear. And all he'll talk about is Hardboiled. Here I am, asking him for intelligent commentary on Rollerball (the movie we actually saw and all I can get out of him is 'Rollerball didn't even approaching the level of violence that Hardboiled blew past in the first five minutes'.

I look at you, my faithful HooToo audience (the female one anyway,) and go 'MEN'. And then I stop sighing and saying one-word sentences and get on with my review.

When it gets right down to it, I can't bring myself to say anything incredibly bad about Rollerball. (But there's always a /few/ things and, of course, here the two that were wrong, be. Yeah.) The way the story was told was, if anything, choppy (If I can use that term here), because of those beb*****ed green filtered night vision cameras they shot a few scenes with. And then the story was so canned and commercialized that, well... ehhh, how can I say? The story wasn't primordially original. But what is anymore, eh?

One thing I /can/ give Rollerball is this/these: The premise was no ends of wonderful. It goes something like this: Crazy Russian (Jean Reno) guy invents a game; gets some people to play it; it becomes an international hit(and then some). But the Russian public enters a recession from gambling on said game too much. Bad thing. So here comes the American Cowboy Good Nice Not-Nasty Kind of Guy (Chris Kline) and he pretty much... well let's just say that justice is had. Yeah. That's a good way to put it.

Then there's the thing with the dialogue. It was so uninspired that it was /inspired/. Too many movies nowadays have people talking like freaking English majors. And everyone in the /real/ world knows that /real/ people don't talk like that. Oh no, no, no, no... /Real/ people talk like blithering idiots. It was quite refreshing to see Hollywood avoiding the attempts to outsmart itself for once. ('People talking like morons are freaking awesome!')

But yeah, the hip happy sparkles of the tears of the Jedi Jade as she watches the philosophically sound storyline play out on the screen before her in violence and sex and green and corporations and Cowboys and scars and lovely sparkly ways with the sparkles and the tears and all that fun stuff. (... mmm, run-on sentences... so more or less, this film comes with very, very high recommendations from the JJ, because it was simply good, bad as it was. So five guys and a and three 's and a and one each, simply for good measure.

Jedi Jade

14.02.02. Front Page

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