Futuresport

7 Years after Rollerball (2025 AD) - The Sport "Future Sport"

( a combination of Extreme Rolelr Skating and Shot Put) has taken over the world. The Los Angeles teams meets Berlin in the finals in New Orleans and are in fact favored. The game however is a Berlin Upset due to one L A player more intrested in individual records than team work. Yet in the meantime , a Pacific Island terrorist group (with it's own F S team) is planning to withdraw the Pacific Islands from North American soverignty, and actually draw up their own Declaration of Independence, not recognizing the results of the 2024 A D North American Elections. Fixx, the inventor of the game (Wesley Snipes) inititally invented the game after basketball completely and suddenly collapsed (As a way for street gangs to solve their turf battles in a more socially acceptable manner) yet dons the uniform to help the North American Continental Mainland Future Sport Team versus Honolulu. If Honoluulu Wins, Hawaii and the Pacific islands win their own soverignty. No questions asked. Check it out.

I thought it was a fun movie to watch. Kind of mindless entertainment. Anybody who likes this should see the great Sci fi movie Rollerball. This movie pales in comparison, but judged on it's own Futuresport is a fun 90 minutes of entertainment.

In the future the NBA has collapsed to be replaced by Future Sport - a new sport combining skateboarding and basketball. The world order has also changed and the North American Alliance is at war with the Hawaiian Liberation Organisation over territory. Future Sport star Tre Ramsey gets drawn into the conflict and offers the solution - a game of Future Sport where the winning country takes all. However with street rules applying and the HLO team being coached by the game's inventor Fixx the stakes are high.

This vaguely similar to Rollerball in it's view of sport in the future - even the game itself is quite similar. However that's where the comparisons end - with Rollerball the plot was quite intelligent, the sport being the way that the ruling forces show the masses the futility of individual action. Here the film starts with some comments about the spirit of the sport being lost since becoming big time and this should be taken as a comment on the NFL, NBA etc. However after this it stops being intelligent and goes into a plot where a sportsman can decide to stop war by declaring a game that both warring factions seem happy to accept. It really is so unlikely that it's hard to even dispel disbelief for 90 minutes....I mean Hawaii versus USA? I don't care how far in the future the film is set but that's never going to be believable.

The film itself is visually poor. Special effects look computer generated and don't fit in with the life action and the sport action is almost dull - with some shots of people getting hit used more than once. In rollerball the action was at least a little exciting, here we all now whose going to win and the director moves it all so fast that we don't get a chance to get into the drama of the game.

Cain shows that TV is the media he belongs in by giving a cocky performance that lacks charisma. He does try to be a bad guy who turns good but he's not convincing in either - in fairness he does get better towards the end as his character gets more sympathetic. Williams is OK but she's not leading material - in fact the film almost seems to be looking for reasons to keep her round (she interviews him, she is his ex, she gets info on the HLO, she gets kidnapped etc), but she is the most believable of the characters. Snipes is terrible - he clearly did this to get the Ex. Producer credit - he does an awful accent through out and seems to only turn up to say something profound or to save the day.

Overall a pretty poor film - go and watch the much better Rollerball with James Cann.

It's takes a special kind of production company to make a movie ripping off Rollerball with Wesley Snipes boring. It's obvious what this movie is about and none of the main cast are unknowns. So how did they manage to make this so dull and unengaging?

This was made by the guy who made the hood classic Juice so you would think it would at least be an average action movie.

FYI this has just appeared on Amazon Prime where it has an over rated 3.5 out of 5.

Don't waste your time.....

I remember seeing this on TV back in the 90's when it was new and later seen it again on TV in 2004.

Dean Cain is one of my favorite TV movie actors, huge fan of "Lois and Clark" and he plays in some decent action movies, so I'm usually excited to see his latest projects.

"Future-sport" is a well made TV movie that is made to be escapist fun. I found this movie on VHS in 2015 and on DVD the same year from a video store, the concept is quite fresh similar to "Roller-ball" and I enjoy the way the game is played out and executed, my mom as well.

I also like the political themes, that by Dean's character playing the game, it replaces warfare instead of countries going to war.

Vanessa L. Williams is pretty good in this as a reporter and as Dean's love interest. I still haven't seen her in very much these days.

Wesley Snipes plays Fixx, an acquaintance to Dean's character who at on point was real friends with him, but Dean's character let fame get to his head and Fixx doesn't want him to forget, and at times brings him back to reality. Wesley is quite good as well, and serves as executive producer for this which is cool too.

Overall a decent TV movie that I find fun and quite underrated, and should be given more credit than it deserves.

I give it a 6.4/10. If you like science fiction b-movies, definitely see it.