Alexi. Cast Chris Klein as Jonathan Cross Jean Reno as Alexi Petrovich LL Cool J as Marcus Ridley Rebecca Romijn as Aurora "The Black Widow" Naveen Andrews as Sanjay Mike Dopud as Michael "The Assassin" Uglich Andrew Bryniarski as Halloran Kata Dobó as Katya Dobolakova Lucia Rijker as Lucia Ryjker Oleg Taktarov as Oleg "Denny" Denekin Paul Heyman as Sports Announcer Janet Wright as Coach Olga The film features cameo appearances by Pink, Slipknot, and Shane McMahon. Production Although the first draft of the script was considered by many 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. This was why 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 as well. The movie was filmed in about 15 weeks, between July 24 and November 2000. McTiernan's first cut, which was over two hours long, was test screened in Las Vegas around April or May 2001, and got a very negative response from test audiences. The release date was then pushed back from May to July 13, 2001, by MGM to test the movie again, hoping that they would find the right audience for it. 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 at least it was 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. "The 'Rollerball' edit I saw was one of the worst films I'd seen in my life. There was jeering in the theater," Knowles said. Knowles was also one of the people who read the original first draft of the script (one that McTiernan rejected) and he said that it was an amazing script which solved all the