ALL-TIME TOP FIVE MOVIES WITH THE MOST PLOTHOLES

1. Rollerball (2002)

I used to waste time arguing over what I considered to be the worst film ever made, but when I saw “Rollerball,” my life got easier. There is not one single moment of this entire movie that makes any semblance of sense, be it in terms of story, appearance, or worst-dialogue-ever-written-having. Here’s the dill. Chris Klein is a star hockey player coaxed into moving to eastern Europe to play Rollerball, a sport where, as far as I gathered, the object is to put a steel ball (why are balls in the future metal? Re: “Starship Troopers”) through some Aztec hoop while on rollerblades and some players are on motorcycles and people don’t get penalized for killing each other. The mastermind behind this is Jean Reno, whose all-encompassing accent allows him to count as Russian (as long as he’s shady), who dreams of getting his ultra-violent sport on North American cable, because people certainly wouldn’t be horrified by constant on-field deaths as long as the sport was also completely unfollowable. Compounding this chaos is the fact that the movie was edited by a cartoon samurai who threw the reel into the air and diced it up real fast with his sword, but the technical failures of this film could fill a whole other dissertation, so let’s concentrate on the plo (I just can’t in good conscience call it a “plot”). Reno tracks the sport’s popularity with a futuristic “instant ratings” system; as Roger Ebert puts it, “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.” For the climactic final game, Reno declares “all rules are off,” which I guess is referring to some offsides rule, seeing as murder had always been legal, but furthermore, who the hell would want to play this game anyway? If you could make $6 million as a star US hockey player, would you really rather move to Indeterminate-Soviet-Place and make $8 million in a sport you’ve never played where people get decapitated regularly? Klein scores one goal at the beginning of the final game, the crowd cheers, and the game instantly devolves into people killing each other with bladed motorcycles, then Klien triumphs by killing Reno and some other evil dude with a machine gun (is murder illegal anywhere in the future??) The ending is mercifully abrupt, albeit even more jaw-dropping than the preceding action scenes; Rebecca Romijin (whose ten minute apology to the audience got cut in the film’s final edit) makes a winking pass at Klien about spending the night together, Rob Zombie shouts “Yeah, my Durango!!!”, blackout, this song kicks up, credits, audience standing-O, Oscar nods come rolling in.

One final anecdote to close off this list: When promoting “Deliver Us From Eva,” “Rollerball” co-star LL Cool J was on "Conan" and claimed, “This new movie’s really good, and I mean actually good, cause sometimes you shoot a film then see it afterwards and you know you’re going to have to go on tv and lie to promote it.” Conan responded, “Wait, so you’re saying you’ve sat in that chair and lied to the American people?” To which LL Cool J simply replied, “Rollerball sucked, Conan. It sucked.”