Its a joke that this film is up for an Oscar

Rating: 2/10 (28 February 2001)

Oscar material? Hardly. Gladiator is at best a "B" level action flick. This film is filled with endless scenes of gore and mayhem, which hardly constitute acting. It is the typical B level flick with tension building to the inevitable encounter of good guy and bad guy, which good guy obviously wins. Crowe walks around for 2 hours and 35 minutes with a semi-pained expression, but not saying much and certainly not acting. A further disservice of this movie is the way it warps history. Marcus Aurelius died of the plague. His son, Commodus, ruled for 12 years and although he was insane and did enter the arena, he was murdered elsewhere. The final Germanic wars of Marcus Aurelius were fought on the Danube frontier and I don't know how you go from the Danube to Italy via a desert, unless you're miserably lost. Which is sort of the theme of this movie. People see this and think they're getting a history lesson rather than just junk. I can easily think of ten movies this past year which had more meaning, intellectual content and stronger acting than Gladiator.