Prayer of the Rollerboys |
  • Japan / USA • 1990 • 95m •   • Directed by: Rick King. • Starring: Corey Haim, Patricia Arquette, Christopher Collet, Julius Harris, Devin Clark, Mark Pellegrino, Morgan Weisser, Jake Dengel, G. Smokey Campbell, John P. Connolly, J.C. Quinn, Trevor Eyster, Aron Eisenberg. • Music by: Stacy Widelitz.   This movie is set in the not so distant future of Los Angeles. The economy has gone bankrupt and Los Angeles has been over-run with violence, drugs and gang warfare. Corey Haim plays Griffin, an old friend of Gary Lee, who works under cover with area police to reveal the para-military gang pushing drugs with ''Day of the Rope'' in it.
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Review:
The story itself could have been the basis for a good, possibly even great, film. Set at an unspecified point in the future, Prayer tells the story of Griffin, a man old enough to have a twelve year old younger brother yet not old enough to have a voice that sounds like that of an adult. The scary part is that Corey is not the only actor at the age of twenty or more in this crapfest to start sounding like an excited old woman at inopportune moments. About the only actor in this film beside Christopher Collet to come out looking like he might even have a second's worth of future in a serious action film would be Mark Pellegrino, who subsequently had a bit part as one of the armoured car robbers in Lethal Weapon 3. Yet Prayer expects us to believe in Corey nutting him with what appears to be a very small iron bar. Hell, even the 5'1" Patricia Arquette can be taken more seriously as an action hero in this mess than Corey. One has to wonder exactly what the moneymen in this endeavour were smoking.
Most Corey Haim films, with the noted exception of The Lost Boys, are nowhere near this pretentious. They know they suck, and they make no attempt to convince anyone otherwise. As I hinted earlier, Prayer is a different bucket of barf primarily because it had potential. With a cast consisting of actors like Anna Paquin, Hugh Jackman, or James Marsden, a remake of Prayer might have a chance. But as it stands, Prayer is one of those films that makes one wonder exactly how the executive producers reacted when they saw what their money had bought them. We even get a highly disturbing sex scene between Haim and Arquette. Arquette would almost apologise for being involved in this film in years to come, which I suppose is a better fate compared to what has become of other poor women who have acted in sex scenes with Haim. Arquette has since gone on to better things, but the advent of digital video ensures that Prayer will keep embarrassing her for all time. This would be one of the few times I think I have felt sympathy for a Hollywood actor.
The final nail in the coffin is in the screenplay. A common problem for bad writers is the failure to think through the results of the characters' actions. For instance, a mock newsreport details how Havard University has been moved over to Japan. Not just the organisation running it, the charter, or the faculty, mind you. They have literally moved it to Japan brick by brick. I fail to follow how America can possibly be in such financial peril if entities in the rest of the world can contemplate spending the enormous cost it would entail to pack every brick, every stone foundation, and every wooden support beam by boat (nobody in their right mind would move this kind of weight by air). With this kind of expenditure, any recession would have to be entirely global. Early on in the film, Christopher Collet attempts to explain this with a speech about how our parents borrowed more money than they could ever repay, and the rest of the world foreclosed. To call this an overly simplistic view of present-day problems is quite flattering.
Adding to the idiocy is an induction ritual involving skating through a secure facility. Apparently, a real good skater can not only skate through the path of automatic gunfire without getting a scratch, they can outrun various kinds of automobiles. This is followed by a demonstration of what the parade ground scenes in StarShip Troopers would have looked like if Ed Wood had directed them with less than half the extras necessary to convincingly fill a Scout hall. What makes it even more hilarious is that after all this incompetent film-making, and the predictable somewhat happy ending takes place, one of our actors even hints that there will be a sequel. Try as I might, I cannot remember a single Haim film that has received a sequel. Even those that are a relative financial success seem to have some magical ingredient such as Haim's acting that convinces financiers that producing a sequel would be a bad idea on a similar level to inserting a white-hot nail file into one's urethra.
When all is said and done, Prayer Of The Rollerboys is a true one out of ten film. Sometimes I will say that you will see worse films, but not many. Prayer is literally so bad it is impossible to imagine others being worse.
Review by mentalcritic from the Internet Movie Database.
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