Marcus Ridley invites the talented sports fanatic Jonathan Cross to join him playing for the Zhambel Horsemen in Kazakhstan.

However, the team quickly discovers that that murder might have been planned before the game, as one of the straps of the victim's helmet had been cut and the cameras filming the event seemed ready for the death to happen.

Jonathan and Ridley pretend to know nothing about this situation, wanting to keep their current lifestyle, but after an "accident" almost kills Aurora, the two friends decide that they need to flee the country to save their lives.

Knowing he cannot trust Jonathan anymore, Alexi tries to stage a public execution of him by removing all the rules from the upcoming Rollerball match.

to be very good and even superior to the original film, director John McTiernan didn't like it because it focused more on social commentary, while he thought that the audience would like to see more of the Rollerball scenes.

He had the original script completely re-written several times and made sure that it focused more on WWE-like showmanship, including crazy costumes and stunts, while changing the film's storyline from a modern-day success story to a classic underdog story and changing the name of the main character in the film from Jonathan E. to Jonathan Cross.

Harry Knowles from Ain't it Cool News was invited by McTiernan for a test screening of the film in Long Island sometime after the first test screening, and in his review of McTiernan's original cut, Knowles said that the movie was bad, but was at least an unapologetic hard-R film with much nudity and some brutal violence in Rollerball scenes, but even as a workprint it was obvious how poorly the action scenes were edited, and the story was bad.

Shortly after the test screenings, MGM appointed a new head of marketing and distribution, Robert Levin, who convinced McTiernan to let go of the summer release date.

McTiernan shot two weeks of additional footage in late 2001 to clarify certain scenes, especially the film's ending, and also cut down the violence and all the nudity.

The site's consensus reads, "Removing the social critique of the original, this updated version of Rollerball is violent, confusing, and choppy.

[14] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade B− on scale of A to F.[15] Time Out's Trevor Johnson described it as "a checklist shaped by a 15-year-old mallrat: thrashing metal track, skateboards, motorbikes, cracked heads and Rebecca Romijn with her top off".

[citation needed] Chicago Sun-Times reviewer Roger Ebert called it "an incoherent mess, a jumble of footage in search of plot, meaning, rhythm and sense".

[17] Rebecca Romijn was nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award as Worst Supporting Actress, where she lost to Madonna for her cameo in Die Another Day.