Good but not brilliant

Rating: Null/10 (27 December 2003)

The production values are high, courtesy of computer graphics, but there are one or two flaws which do nag. First, the computer effects themselves give the texture of the film a certain muddy, unreal quality. It is difficult to put your finger on it, but there is something artificial about the look of the film which cannot be ignored.
Second, there is a huge hole in the narrative which makes you wonder: our friend Maximus arrives back home, finds his family murdered and homestead burnt down, is taken by slave traders (who came from where? Where is the home? The suggestion was that it was somewhere in Southern Europe - Spain possibly - rather than North Africa), transported to North Africa/Asia, trained as a gladiator etc.
This whole process would surely take many months if not a year or two. But at the end of Maximus' training - of at least a year if not more - young Commodus arrives back from murdering his dad. What's he been doing those past two years? Surely not hanging around somewhere as deeply unattractive, not to say rough and ready, as Germany? The whole timeline is even more unconvincing in that Maximus seems to manage to get from his would-be execution in Germany to Spain in about a week and a half. This might not seem important to some, but basic flaws like that make you wonder whether this is just, at best, supercharged schlock with added computer tricks.