A great big disappointment

Rating: 5/10 (11 June 2000)

I found this film extremely disappointing. Maybe it is wrong to make comparisons but if put besides Ben Hur or Sparticus, this had a distinct lack of narrative power, interesting characters, heart or intellectual meaning. I personally did not care about Maximus  a man with the minimus of personality  or indeed about any of the barely sketched figures which people the film. I also found Ridley Scott's visual style contemptuous. He does not seem the least bit concerned about making images with meaning or power but merely illustrates the script with pretty, overly crowded pictures. Most of it looked like an expensive advert. I kept expecting the actors to climb into a bath and eat a flake, or a new model of car to drive by, or the gladiators to run round the stadium in adidas trainers! With the exception of Derek Jacobi and Oliver Reed, the actors (especially the wildly overrated Joachim Pheonix) were not up to the job, the script lurched from one meaningless event to another and the human interest was zero. I simply cannot understand why people have fallen for this drivel.