My next logistical puzzlement involves killing the zombies. They die when you shoot them. Fine, except Umbrella Corp. has developed some mutants who wear bulletproof armor. Zillions of rounds of ammo bounce off this armor, but here’s a funny thing: The mutants do not wear helmets, so we can see their ugly faces. So why not just shoot them in the head? Am I missing something here?
What I was missing were more of the mutants from the first picture, where they were little monsters with nine-foot tongues. They have a walk-on (or maybe a lick-on) in the sequel, but it’s no big deal. Resident Eviclass="underline" Apocalypse could have used them, but then this is a movie that could have used anything. The violence is all video-game target practice, the zombies are a bore, we never understand how Umbrella hopes to make money with a virus that kills everyone, and the characters are spectacularly shallow. Parents: If you encounter teenagers who say they liked this movie, do not let them date your children.
Rollerball
(DIRECTED BY JOHN MCTIERNAN; STARRING CHRIS KLEIN, JEAN RENO; 2004)
Rollerball is an incoherent mess, a jumble of footage in search of plot, meaning, rhythm, and sense. There are bright colors and quick movement on the screen, which we can watch as a visual pattern that, in entertainment value, falls somewhere between a kaleidoscope and a lava lamp.
The movie stars Chris Klein, who shot to stardom, so to speak, in the American Pie movies and inhabits his violent action role as if struggling against the impulse to blurt out, “People, why can’t we all just get along?” Klein is a nice kid. For this role, you need someone who has to shave three times a day.
The movie is set in 2005 in a Central Asian republic apparently somewhere between Uzbekistan and Mudville. Jean Reno plays Petrovich, owner of “the hottest sports start-up in the world,” a Rollerball league that crowds both motorcycles and roller skaters on a figure eight track that at times looks like a Roller Derby crossed with demo derby, at other times like a cruddy video game. The sport involves catching a silver ball and throwing it at a big gong so that showers of sparks fly. One of the star players confesses she doesn’t understand it, but so what: In the final game Petrovich suspends all rules, fouls, and penalties. This makes no difference that I could see.
Klein plays Jonathan Cross, an NHL draft pick who has to flee America in a hurry for the crime of racing suicidally down the hills of San Francisco flat on his back on what I think is a skateboard. His best friend is Marcus Ridley (LL Cool J), who convinces him to come to Podunkistan and sign for the big bucks. Jonathan is soon attracted to Aurora (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, from X-Men).
“Your face isn’t nearly as bad as you think,” he compliments her. She has a scar over one eye, but is otherwise in great shape, as we can see because the locker rooms of the future are coed. Alas, the women athletes of the future still turn their backs to the camera at crucial moments, carry strategically placed towels, stand behind furniture, and in general follow the rules first established in 1950s nudist volleyball pictures.
I counted three games in the Rollerball season. The third is the championship. There is one road trip, to a rival team’s Rollerball arena, which seems to have been prefabricated in the city dump. The games are announced by Paul Heyman, who keeps screaming, “What the hell is going on?” There is no one else in the booth with him. Yet when Aurora wants to show Jonathan that an injury was deliberate, she can call up instant replays from all the cameras on equipment thoughtfully provided in the locker room.
The funniest line in the movie belongs to Jean Reno, who bellows, “I’m this close to a North American cable deal!” North American cable carries Battling Bots, Iron Chefs, Howard Stern, and monster truck rallies. There isn’t a person in the audience who couldn’t get him that deal. Reno also has the second funniest line. After Jonathan engages in an all-night 120-mph motorcycle chase across the frozen steppes of Bankruptistan, while military planes drop armed Jeeps to chase him, and after he sees his best pal blown to bits after leaping across a suspension bridge that has been raised in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, Reno tells him, “Play well tonight.”
Oh, and I almost forgot Aurora’s breathless discovery after the suspicious death of one of the other players. “His chinstrap was cut!” she whispers fiercely to Jonathan. Neither she nor he notices that Jonathan makes it a point never to fasten his own chinstrap at any time during a game.
Someday this film may inspire a long, thoughtful book by John Wright, its editor. My guess is that something went dreadfully wrong early in the production. Maybe dysentery or mass hypnosis. And the director, John McTiernan (Die Hard), was unable to supply Wright with the shots he needed to make sense of the story. I saw a Russian documentary once where half the shots were blurred and overexposed because the KGB attacked the negative with X-rays. Maybe this movie was put through an MRI scan. Curiously, the signifiers have survived, but not the signified. Characters set up big revelations and then forget to make them. And the long, murky night sequence looks like it was shot, pointlessly, with the green-light NightShot feature on a consumer video camera.
One of the peculiarities of television of the future is a device titled “Instant Global Rating.” This supplies a digital readout of how many viewers there are (except on North American cable systems, of course). Whenever something tremendously exciting happens during a game, the rating immediately goes up. This means that people who were not watching somehow sensed they had just missed something amazing and responded by tuning in. When Rollerball finally does get a North American cable deal, I predict the ratings will work in reverse.
Romeo Must Die
(DIRECTED BY ANDRZEJ BARTKOWIAK; STARRING JET LI, AALIYAH; 2000)
Shakespeare has been manhandled in countless modern-dress retreads, and I was looking forward to Romeo Must Die, billed as a war between Chinese and African-American families, based on Romeo and Juliet. After China Girl (1987), which sets the story in New York’s Little Italy and Chinatown, and Romeo + Juliet (1996), which has a war between modern gangsters in a kind of CalMex strip city, why not a martial arts version in Oakland?
Alas, the film borrows one premise from Shakespeare (the children of enemy families fall in love), and buries the rest of the story in a creaky plot and wheezy dialogue. Much is made of the presence of Jet Li, the Hong Kong martial arts star (Lethal Weapon 4), but his scenes are so clearly computer-aided that his moves are about as impressive as Bugs Bunny doing the same things.
Li stars as Han Sing, once a cop, now taking the rap for a crime he didn’t commit. He’s in a Hong Kong prison as the movie opens. His brother is killed in Oakland after a fight at an African-American dance club, and Sing breaks out of prison to travel to America and avenge his brother. In Oakland, he meets Trish O’Day (Aaliyah, the singer) and they begin to fall in love while she helps him look into the death of his brother.
But what a coincidence! Her father, Isaak (Delroy Lindo), may know more about the death than he should, and soon the two lovers are in the middle of a war between Chinese and black organizations who are involved in a murky plot to buy up the waterfront for a new sports stadium. This real estate project exists primarily as a clothesline on which to hang elaborate martial arts sequences, including one Jackie Chan-style football game where Jet Li hammers half a dozen black guys and scores a touchdown, all at once.