3, count 'em, 3 writers on the screenplay!

Rating: 3/10 (7 May 2000)

If for some reason you are forced to see this movie (heavy sedation and the like), the costuming was sensational and the soundtrack is fantastic - try to focus on that.
Otherwise,the plot (!) is cumbersome, the excessive violence is tedious, the paranoid emperor thing is boring and the hero against all odds has been done to death.
Not even Derek Jacobi and Russell Crowe could carry this albatross.