'Rollerball' remake crashes and burns

I'm at a loss to explain exactly what potential John McTiernan ("The Thomas Crown Affair") saw when he tackled this remake, especially in light of the silly, stupid, incoherent mess that has finally arrived onscreen.

MOVIE REVIEW

ROLLERBALL

DIRECTOR: John McTiernan

CAST: Chris Klein, Jean Reno, LL Cool J, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Naveen Andrews

RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for violence, extreme sports action, sensuality, language and some drug references

WHERE: Alderwood 7, Cinema 17, Everett 9, Factoria, Galaxy 12, Galleria, Issaquah 9, Kent 6, Lewis & Clark, Longston, Meridian 16, Redmond Town Center, Renton Village, SeaTac North, Woodinville 12

GRADE: D

In the original 1975 "Rollerball," a mix of preachy sermonizing and violent pageantry, the sport was a brutal cocktail of football, rugby and roller derby (that brilliantly trashy almost-sport), stripped down, sped up and transformed into a bloodlust spectacle. Professional sports reduced to the lowest common denominators and an audience there for blood, pure and simple.

For 2002, McTiernan has transformed it into a collision of extreme sports and professional wrestling and replaced the fierce, scarred survivor played by James Caan with the baby-face blank of Chris Klein ("American Pie"). Ostensibly cast for his all-American heartland looks and fullback size, he's a Keanu Reeves without the charm or the charge.

Klein's Jonathan is a naīve adrenaline junkie looking for his break into professional sports. He finds it in the Eastern European/Asian phenomenon of Rollerball. "It's not a sport, it's a circus," he protests, but soon enough he's a star player and an international hero.

And then he find the dirty little secret behind the league: The ratings surge every time someone gets hurt and the seemingly concerned league godfather (Jean Reno) is engineering more accidents for those instant spikes. (Apparently the future of TV is controlled by channel surfers who call up one another and exclaim, "Did you see what happened on channel 5?!!!") New corporate Emperor Reno drools with delight as he ups the stakes and sacrifices his players to the ratings gods.

If there were ever any teeth to this caricature of modern sports entertainment and media exploitation, they've been yanked out, along with the more extreme moments of brutality and gore. The desperation trims and reshoots to turn the original R rating into a PG-13 have left their mark, reducing the games (played on a cramped, claustrophobic track that looks more like a go-cart obstacle course than a professional arena) to a rapid-fire montage of highlights with no sense of coherence or context.

Coupled with the flavorless dialogue of the inane script and a leading man who registers all the glow of a black hole, there's nothing to anchor this mindless mess of a film.