A good try, but too many flaws for "classic" status.

Rating: 7/10 (20 March 2005)

Gladiator is an ambitious attempt to tell the story of a man's revenge against the backdrop of the Roman Empire. Russell Crowe stars as a successful general who is sold into slavery after being deposed by a ruthless upstart young emperor. We see him fight his way through the ranks as a gladiator and eventually square off against the young tyrant on the floor of the coliseum. Though not a historically accurate film, it is still worth seeing for a few of the fight scenes, and some of the performances.
Crowe is as good as he needs to be as Maximus, the deposed general who only wishes to return home to harvest his crops after defeating a barbaric army at the film's beginning. However the dying old emperor, well-played by Richard Harris, wants to hand over control of Rome to this fine man. When the emperor's evil son hears of this plan, he kills his father and takes control of the empire. Since Maximus refuses to swear allegiance to the new emperor, he is order to be killed along with his wife and child. Maximus escapes the Roman soldiers, but is soon captured and sold into slavery as a gladiator. The rest of the film is centered around Maximus and his plans to overthrow the young emperor with the help of the emperor's sister and a few well-meaning senators.
Gladiator could have been a great film, but it's a little unfocused, and some of the scenes could have been filmed a little better. For example, the opening battle starts off well. We see a fully-armed Roman army set to do battle with a Germanic hoard. We get some good shots of Roman archers and infantry men launching a barrage of arrows and flaming debris on the barbarians, and that looks pretty impressive. However, when the battle becomes hand-to-hand combat, everything becomes too murky and hard to follow. Some of the fight scenes between gladiators have the same sort of problems. Maximus, as his instructor tells him, does in fact kill too quickly. Sometimes he has dispatched five or six men without us even realizing how he did it. True he was an experienced soldier who would have gone for quick and efficient kills, but the spectacle is lost in some instances. The re-created Battle of Carthage is probably the most memorable combat scene, and it works fairly well.
Few of the characters in this film are likable or well-defined. Oliver Reed gets the best lines, but his character is never fully developed to the point that we understand him. This could be the result of his untimely death during filming, though. Connie Nielsen and Derek Jacobi also have curious roles in the sense that we never really know who's side they are on, or if they are only using Maximus. There is an implied close relationship between both Maximus and Nielsen's character, but it leads nowhere. When I first saw this film, I thought Jaoquin Phoenix was over-acting badly, but now I'm not so sure. It is more than likely that a young emperor of Rome would have behaved with selfishness and paranoia, and Phoenix seems to revel in his role.
Overall, this film reminds me quite a bit of Conan the Barbarian. We have similar scenes and themes throughout. Also, we even get an appearance by Sven Thorsen who played a bad guy in Conan. Here, he plays a former champion who comes out of retirement to challenge Maximus in one exciting scene.
This film is really no better than Conan The Barbarian, and Crowe lacks Ahnold's charisma and physique.
Bottom line: 7 of 10 stars. Worth a look, but not really Best Picture material.
The hound has spoken.