Extremely Disappointing...

Rating: 6/10 (28 July 2000)

This has to be one of the most disappointing films I've seen in awhile. I'm a huge fan of Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe, unfortunately their collaboration on this film resulted in an extremely boring film with drab cinematography and no heart. I will admit the opening battle scene is pretty impressive, and all the other battle scenes are above average. Everything in between is mind numbingly boring, the plot was like something out of the Street Fighter games I played as a kid.
With an epic film of such scope like this I expected at least some nice cinematography, but it was dark, and uninteresting. The CGI collisium was equally disappointing, it looked like a model out of a computer game and like Roger Ebert pointed out, the fans in the stands were blurry. Ben-Hur or Spartacus were a lot better at giving you that feeling of being in acienct Rome and just sucking you into their world, this movie left me feeling distant from everything that was happening on screen.
Although Russell Crowe gives a respectable performance as Maximus, all the characters were uninteresting. I didn't feel anything for any of them and when the emperor was finally killed I was just happy the movie was almost over. If the relationship between Maximus and his family had been more fleshed out I might've felt some more sympathy for him, but when he kissed commodus' sister, all sympathy i had for him disappeared.
I think one of the reasons the movie is so popular might have to do with the fact that although there are long boring scenes, you quickly forget about them when people start getting their heads chopped off. It's unfortunate when a movie like this comes out and immediately catapults up to #59 on the user top 250 when films like The Thin Red Line aren't even on the list. Go rent Spartacus for a better film set in ancient Rome.
**/***** 2 stars out of five