Futuresport (1999)

I have to admit that I have seen some truly awful movies in my life, but this one takes the cake. This movie took most of the respect I had for Snipes and killed it. There is nothing positive I can say. This is one of those movies that is so bad it is unintentionally funny. Between the acting, writing, directing, and special effects, there is not one positive. For instance, one exchange between Fixx and Sythe after Coach Douglas is killed by the mechanical spider goes as follows: "Fixx: Hell yeah, I hired you to make sure no one gets hurt. Sythe: Yeah. Fixx: Douglas is dead. Sythe: So?" That doesn't even make sense. As for the special effects, final game contains some of the fakest scenes I have ever seen. For instance, the leg break is clearly an empty pant leg with padding inside. Then there is the interception that Tre makes at the end of the game when he flies high above the court and his cheeks flap in the wind. Then, the worst of all is the back-flip/front-flip/barrel roll that Tre pulls off to tie the game. I cannot say enough bad things about this film.

Pop quiz: if you had invented a groundbreaking new sport in your present, what would you call it?Futuresport provides that answer with, of course, the game of futuresport. Futuresport, the game of our future in case you still didn't figure that part out from the title, is a mixture of handball and rollerblading which started on the streets and now, in 2025, has been co-opted by corporate America. While there are still street futuresporters, the pros are clean cut, effeminate, money grabbing glory seekers (and who better to play that role than prettyboy Dean Cain).As it turns out, Hawaii is trying to secede from the union and the only way to prevent this without the use of military force is a winner take all game of futuresport between the clean shaven pros and the down and dirty Hawaiian liberation street ballers. The finale is a climactic battle royale between the pros and the ex-cons with a surprising role reversal by the founder of Futuresport, played by Wesley Snipes. From that point you can guess who wins.While this sounds like a premise with immense negative potential for bad filmmaking, in the end Futuresport is simply mediocre, not mindnumbingly awful. There is decent production quality, the acting is passable, and the storyline predictable, but logical. Other than the title and premise, a bad, but not especially memorable film is the result.

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.

I liked the setting of an old sports theme placed in future withglobal war on horizon. The sports theme harkens back to M. Rooney and a film called fireball -very old but is basically about playing to be the star of the game vs learning to be a team player. Dean Cain was superb in the role. Using the game to solve a territorial dispute was also interesting. The game itself was believable given advances in technology. Wesley Snipes and Vanessa Williams were also good but the film was Dean's and he pulled it off very well.