Review Index

Home

I spent six hours in ancient rome the first week of May, 2000. On Thursday night, I went to see Julie Taymor's bizarre adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. On Friday, I was in a first-night crowd for Ridley Scott's Gladiator. Both films share more than a common setting, though. Both of them are insufferably pretentious. Gladiator is the worse off for that, though, because it has three Hollywood screenwriters where Titus had William Shakespeare (admittedly on an off day, but even on an off day, The Bard is worth the entirety of Hollywood). You could also tell what was going on in any given scene in Titus, which is not the case with Gladiator. There has been a lot of buzz about Gladiator on the internet and in the trade press. It's going to be a big hit. It is being compared favorably to Spartacus.

Well, bugger all of that. Gladiator is crap. It's crap gussied up like an old style epic, but a lot of those old-style epics were crap, too.

The story follows Maximus, the general in the north for Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and who the emperor favors to succeed him. The emperor's son, Commodus, has different ideas. He murders his father before he can announce the succession and dispatches Maximus to be executed by the Praetorian guard. Maximus escapes this fate, but after returning to his home to discover his wife and son murdered, he is captured by slavers and taken to North Africa to become a gladiator. Meanwhile, the new emperor declares a games to mourn his father and to distract the mob from his machinations against the senate. Maximus returns to Rome as a gladiator and has a final showdown with the mad emperor.

The plot of Gladiator reminds me of Rocky, but it isn't as good as Rocky. In Rocky, the fight is clear. You can see the action in the ring. It is staged so that it is clear to the audience what is happening. Gladiator obscures everything with shaky hand-held camerawork, grainy film stock, and rapid-fire editing. Nothing is clear. I, for one, felt cheated. If I go to a movie called "Gladiator," dammit, I want to see combat. I want to know what is going on. More than that, though, I want it to be known in Hollywood that computer generated backgrounds STILL look like computer generated backgrounds. The ARTIFICE of everything in Gladiator is intrusive. It's really annoying, too. But perhaps the MOST annoying thing about Gladiator is the fact that, if the new emperor had even half a brain, the movie would be over in twenty minutes. Instead, it lurches forward in fits and starts for nearly three hours.

If Gladiator has anything to recommend it, it is the performances. Russell Crowe is excellent as Maximus, as are Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus, Connie Nielsen as Lucilla, and Richard Harris as Marcus Aurelius. Crowe, in particular seems headed for superstardom. But good as the actors are, and they are all VERY good, the movie itself isn't worthy of them. Pity.