Rote Revenge Pic Poses as Historical Epic

Rating: 6/10 (4 August 2008)

"Gladiator", winner of the Best Picture Academy Award in 2001, is less a historical epic of swords, sandals, and the fate of a mighty empire, and more of a bloated B-movie about a guy with a gloomy face seeking revenge for the murder of his family. "Death Wish" in Ancient Rome, if you will.
Thanks to director Ridley Scott it's a very pretty picture to look at: the icy blue light of a wintry Germanic battlefield, the amber hue of the emperor's throne room, and the Coliseum littered with rose petals like confetti. The many gruesome gladiatorial fight scenes are frenetically paced, visceral if not actually coherent. Some of the modern special effects, however, like the CGI cityscapes, look a bit crude, even by 1999's standards.
The script, like most of the scripts that Ridley Scott works from, is strictly rough-draft material. The characters are shallow, the dialogue is stilted and awkward, and the story tries too hard to intertwine the drama of the Roman political arena with the action of the hero's central journey in the more literal arena -- the former scenes only serve as breathing room between the latter scenes, which are the real meat of the film. Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix make the most out of their limited roles -- Crowe's terse delivery and brooding eyes establish his character better than the writer ever could -- but veterans Richard Harris and Oliver Reed nearly vanish into parts that ask too little of their great talents.
In the end it doesn't feel like a proper epic: it's not the sort of epoch-defining story that spans years and continents and a huge historical canvas, like "Ben-Hur" or "Spartacus" were -- or Anthony Mann's "The Fall of the Roman Empire" which told essentially the same story in 1964. It's not even "Braveheart", another gory, overblown revenge flick. It's trying to be big and important, but it has nothing important to say; its only purpose is to construct a framework for swordfights.