Ridley Scott's lame take on a WWF bout

Rating: 1/10 (17 December 2000)

The denizens of the Roman Empire were a particularly bloodthirsty lot, and apparently not that far off in mentality from our own culture. The vox populi, bored to the heavens with the multitudinous burdens inflicted on them by their government, seek escape in the mind-numbingly bland entertainment provided within the Colosseum. Gladiators fend for their lives against a series of uniquely dressed foes and beasts, all in the hope of winning their freedom. Everything about this testosterone-toned epic is meant to cater to a population who likes their filmed landscapes served to them WWF-style.
Maximus (Russell Crowe) is a top army general in the army of Marcus Auerlius (Richard Harris), a dying patriarch who (in predictable fashion) unwittingly causes trouble within the family ranks by offering his throne to Maximus instead of to his son Commodus (Joaquin Pheonix). Auerlius' son is the kind of whinny, pussy-whipped boy that your audience likes to hate because the character's moral fiber makes the character so easily expendable. Commodus' temper tantrums lead to patricide and the film turns into an interminably messy three-hour affair simply centering on the standard theme of revenge.
Maximus is sent to die in the woods but manages to get the upper hand and kill Commodus' henchmen. He returns to his homestead only to find his wife and son lynched from trees. Poor Maximus is denied the throne of Rome and is now being fueled to wage a one-man war against the sissy who wiped away his entire family. As Maximus works his way back to Rome, unbeknownst to the new king Commodus, our foppish king swishes around the kingdom ridiculously hitting on his sister Lucilla (Connie Nielson) and hovering inappropriately over his nephew Lucius (Spencer Treat Clark).
In the first hour Ridley Scott has expertly painted his archetypal figures, forcing us to love the brave Maximus, wifeless and sonless, and hate the creepy teenager with the thirst for forbidden fruit. Maximus, once back in Rome, manages to enter a gladiator troop manned by one Proximo, the late Oliver Reed. This little group of circus freaks will provide Maximus with the proper cover through which he can maneuver himself into the hearts of Rome's people. Not only is the man driven by revenge but he is also cocky enough to believe that he has what it takes to accomplish the sort of feats no other gladiator has been able to accomplish. By his side is Juba (Djimon Hounsou), the proverbial Black voice of wisdom. If not for Will Smith's more unfortunately stereotypical role in Legend of Bagger Vance, this would have been the kind of role that would have garnered the deserved scorn of people like Spike Lee.
For two hours, Scott inundates us with endless arena fireworks that would serve the acrobatics of the Rock and Hulk Hogan to a much better effect. The characterization of Crowe's character amounts to nothing more than a cocksure man, full of false bravado, whose only apparent skill is to raise his arm into the air and scream for his men to surge into battle. He is the kind of screen character who wages war against hundreds of foes within the course of a movie and manages to dispose of all of them with relative ease. He is also the kind of superhero archetype that garners the admiration of young boys like Lucius, something which causes our dear Commodus to go even further over the edge.
Scott is to be admired in the end for at least not being a hypocrite, as he practices what he preaches. Since the citizens of Rome seem only to live for bloodlust, Scott manages to paint Gladiator as nothing else than that: entertainment geared for audiences whose sole interest is seeing men and tigers beat the s**t out of each other for three hours. But if this is all there was to the film then one would see little complaints from my person but Scott makes the mistake of filling his film with arty flourishes.
The film opens with Maximus walking across a field, his hands slowly caressing tall blades of grass. These flashbacks, along with various cutaways to fast-moving skyscapes, amount to nothing more than pretentious attempts to add artistic credibility to an otherwise sophomoric film. Its as if he is aware of the fact that his film is devoid of any three-dimensional resonance that he tries to quickly interject soft touches of humanity into the proceedings. The end result is nothing less than visual illiteracy, ringing completely false and cowardly.
When it comes to epics none come better than Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev or Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, two masterworks from Russia's greatest directors that fully captured the three-dimensional scope of war. The bad guys in these films, unlike the one played by Phoenix in Gladiator, are the kinds of foes whose selfishly malicious journeys are never cartoonishly drawn. The landscapes created by the Russian masters were poetic and grand, full of visual and emotional urgency. Scott's film is amounts to nothing more than being beat over the head by a club for three hours.