Only a flesh wound

Rating: 6/10 (24 March 2001)

Gladiator isn't a great film by any means, but it isn't nearly as bad as some reviews would suggest. Sure, it depends mainly on big budget spectacle and production design to achieve its effect, but it's surprising how far big budget spectacle can take you.
I disagree with those who say that Russell Crowe was more or less interchangeable with any other Hollywood action star in the main role. I thought his basic persona - the strong yet vulnerable man carrying deep hurts - was quite well used in this film, and his performance and Connie Nielsen's lent a semblance of human interest to a script that didn't give them much to work with. The film's ability to build human drama isn't helped by its failure to provide a credible villain: it's obvious from the beginning that Commodus is no more going to be a match for Maximus than Frank Burns was for Hawkeye and B.J.
Some people have also criticized the film for its gratuitous violence, but I'm not sure if I go along with that either. If you are going to make a gladiator movie, you might as well go for broke. As a number of commentators have pointed out, we go to gladiator movies for pretty much the same reason as the Romans went to the Colosseum. To see blood.
Having said all that, I don't think the film was particularly well made. The film seems if anything to get less spectacular as it goes along, and what should be a series of climactic sequences at the end come across as hurried and confused. There are also rather too many places where the film is unintentionally comic. There's the film's odd notion that the Roman ruling classes all spoke in upper-class British accents. Then there are what look like odd borrowings from, or maybe misplaced tributes to, other films: the American Beauty-style falling petals, or the slow-motion battle sequences, which looked elegiacal in Kurosawa but seem Pythonesque here. Actually, even Maximus' name struck me as Pythonesque - I kept wondering whether his first name was Naughtius, and whether he had a friend called Biggus. Perhaps Naughtius Maximus would be an apt nickname for Russell Crowe in real life.
Once or twice the film does hint at higher ambitions. It touches on the theme of Commodus', Gracchus' and Maximus' relationships with the public, and the potential was there for the film to be a very original type of political thriller - something that would have given point to all those crowd scenes and all those power plays. But that theme isn't developed. In the end, Gladiator is not that kind of film.