A Movie for the Toilet Bowl

Rating: 1/10 (30 March 2004)

This movie is the very epitome of what I hate about movies. The Hollywood-ization/bastardization of what could have been a great movie. The FX and action were great, the characterization was adequate, the plot was dumb, and the ending was abysmal. Why doesn't anyone in Hollywood have the courage to take a movie where it ought to go instead of where the test audiences say it should go?
This is a gladiator movie. You know what that means? It was set during the Roman Empire. During the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus. It was NOT a fantasy. When you set a movie during a historical time frame, there are certain rules you have to abide by. One of those is, you do not rewrite history on a grand scale. The main reason to set a movie within a historical context is to give it plausibility. You do not then crap on that plausibility by having the characters do things that would have caused all of history to lumber down a different path.
In Braveheart, William Wallace did not rally the Scots, defeat the English, march into London, kill the king of England in a duel, and establish a democracy. Why? Because that isn't what happened; and it would have turned a great movie into a crappy movie. In Dances With Wolves, John Dunbar does not rally the Sioux nation in a war to conquer the United States, kill Ulysses S. Grant in a duel, and establish a new form of government in Washington based on Sioux practices. Why? Because that isn't what happened; and it would have turned a great movie into a crappy movie. In Gangs of New York, Leo DiCaprio's character did not face Abe Lincoln in an arena, kill him, and establish a new form of government in Washington where the Irish were the ruling class. Why? Because that isn't what happened; and it would have turned a mediocre movie into a crappy movie.

***SPOILER ALERT!!!***

So in Gladiator, an exiled Roman general kills the Emperor in the arena and in so doing allows the reestablishment of the Roman Republic in 182 A.D. You know what? It didn't happen that way, and it turned a great movie into a crappy movie. The makers of this movie took all the plausibility of setting and trashed it. They took a pretty good historical action movie and turned it into a suck-ass fantasy. And the better the movie is before the movie-makers pull their pants down and squat over it, the more I resent the dump being taken on it. And that's the case here.