What's the big whoop?

Rating: 1/10 (3 June 2001)

Well, that was a big old damp squib. The budget and the decent cast
ensure that Gladiator is a competent film, but its by no means a good
one.
Sure, there are some genuinely engaging fight sequences, but that's
_all_ Gladiator has going for it. And to be brutally frank, they're
not all that great technically. Crowe gives it his best shot, but his
opponents have to do a lot of incompetent poses to allow him to chop
them up, and for me that ruins any actual dramatic effect that the
action sequences might have had.
The extended conversations are just boring. The characters are well
acted, but are sketchy and uninvolving, and I just can't bring myself
to care about any of them. And sure, Maximus has a sad story, but so
would all of his fellow gladiators, yet we don't get to hear them
whining. Rank apparently does have its priveleges even in the slave
pits.
Oliver Reed stands out by actually making his character vaguely
intersting, but that's the balanced by the insipid Connie Neilson
who's utterly mundane and can't decide what accept she's trying to
affect.
Gladiator is a waste of budget, time and talent. It's a great
shame that it was such a success, because it will just encourage more
studios to throw money at similar follies on the basis that no film
with a budget in excess of 100 million dollars US has ever lost money.