No I am not entertained.

Rating: 4/10 (2 April 2001)

No I am not entertained. I went to this movie expecting little and receiving less. I could single out certain individuals to point the finger at for this artistic failure of a film, but can't seem to see the point in it, this film was bad in so many areas that it really is a collaborative debacle. Even the general audience failed, because in accepting this film the standards for what will be honored as a great film have been lowered dramatically. The dialogue was stupid, the characters were completely overdrawn, the performances were typical, the plot was as formulaic as it gets, not one moment in this film left me anticipating the next, not one character was original or intriguing, and the cinematography was unimaginative and monotonous. On top of this they kill off Richard Harris the best actor in the film at the beginning of this movie which crawls on its belly to the end. To its credit the film does a decent job of creating the coliseum which unfortunately is not as impressive given the fact that Spartacus the original gladiator film was done four decades before this release and was just as successful if not more in this aspect. This film never comes close to achieving the success of similar films made long ago. At best Gladiator is a watered down flat derivative of Spartacus. The film is as dead as the time period it was supposed to depict, and perhaps just as dead is the general public's knowledge of a good film. As a side note when one asks why it is important to have an appreciation and understanding of history in regards to art or a lexicon in the language of film I can think of no better reason than 'without a perspective of a variety of great works one will never fully be able to appreciate or understand what a great work truly is.' In short this film lacked everything that constitutes a great film. What is that? Great filmmaking.