THE MOST OVERRATED MOVIE IN HISTORY!

Rating: 1/10 (21 November 2000)

This movie is a simpleton's epic. The storyline doesn't pass the laugh test. Here's the outline (I would warn of SPOILERS, but this thing is already ROTTEN):
1) After a great victory in GERMANY, a Heroic Roman general (Russell Crowe) and 100-year-old Roman Emperor with BOTH FEET in the grave (a pathetic-looking Richard Harris) plot to bring back the REPUBLIC to Rome.
2) The Emperor's EVIL -- that's E-V-I-L -- and effeminate son (a WAY-OVER-THE-TOP Joaquin Phoenix) gets p***ed when daddy doesn't want to give him supreme power,finishes pushing pops into the grave, attempts the kill the good general, but just wipes out his family a thousand miles in SPAIN instead.
3) Just after he discovers his wife and kid are TOAST, the grief-stricken good general is conveniently abducted by slavers to AFRICA, where he becomes THE GREATEST GLADIATOR EVER!, killing off dozens of opponents with each rippled bicep and impressing his teacher, played by Oliver Reed (who played with similar scene-chewing bravado in his prime).
4) The good general goes back to ROME, where he wipes out legions in the Colisseum simply by ripping off his shirt to show his MIGHTY PECTORALS! Heads and arms and legs and lots of bloody parts fly all over in the MOST RIDICULOUS GLADITORIAL FIGHTS EVER! The EVIL SON, who is now the E-V-I-L EMPEROR quakes in effeminate fear of this MIGHTY GLADIATOR, who is now the MOST POPULAR MAN IN ROME! He suggests incest to his comely sister (Connie Nielsen), but -- strangely -- she prefers the SHIRTLESS GLADIATOR GENERAL, who promises to bring REPUBLICAN freedom to all ROME.
5) The E-V-I-L EMPEROR lops off the heads of all the free-thinking Republican Senators and fatally backstabs the CHESTY GLADIATOR. He jumps into the ARENA himself to finish him off, but our HAIRY HERO manages to end the E-V-I-L ONE's misery, and our own.
Russell Crowe has a primordial presence which obviously strongly appeals to both male and female audiences, but this movie is a joke. It says a lot when the best performance turned in was by the Oliver Reed, who died during the shooting and had a few of his scenes filled with Oliver's face superimposed by computer over an anonymous actor.
The movie also looks terrible with a computer-generated Colisseum which looks totally plastic and a darkness in most of the scenes that is near impenetrable, except, of course, in the ludicrous gladitorial scenes in which every eviscerating moment is in bright sunshine.
This movie is Spartacus and Ben Hur for the plot-challenged, character-challenged, nano-second-attention-spanned modern audiences. An Eviscerated Epic.