Well done, Russell Crowe!

Rating: 9/10 (16 April 2001)

The film seems to be symptomatic: an empire turns out a film about an empire. So what do the audiences get? On the one hand, the scriptwriter will obviously not set the Thames on fire. The plot is very predictable, the action (especially in the first part of the film) dragged out, dialogue anaemic. There is a "politically correct" Juba and the optimistic end. Good guys go home, the evil emperor is punished, Commodus's sister makes another stilted speech. The drawbacks are numerous: first, I doubt that Marcus Aurelius looked so old (he died when he was 59), second, the child Lucius looks like a typical American kid with strange outfit on, Commodus was killed after he had reigned in Rome for 12 years.
So what keeps this film from being a tedious pseudo-Roman stuff? First of all, Russell Crowe. He managed to convey that sense of inborn dignity which can't be taken from a real Man. He did a very good job of his character bordering on magic (taking the poor stuff he had to work with into consideration). Second, it's the sound-track. And third, it's the work of the cameramen. The magnificent landscapes, the huge moon, the glimpses of the other world, the silver cypresses moving in the wind. I believe the film is hardly a new word in cinema, BUT it's a story of a Man, a human being at last, not a story of mundane violence. I think people are getting pretty tired of drugs and addicts, cops and mobsters, tearful soap operas. It's a "fairy tale" of course, too, but not a bad one.
I'd like to mention that an imdb-user Aleona said it was implausible that a Roman emperor had fought a gladiator. An encyclopedia says about Commodus that he took part in gladiator fights.