Yet another over-rated classic

Rating: 4/10 (22 December 2000)

Whenever a new Ridley Scott movie appears, I can hardly contain my indifference. He's way too variable in terms of quality for me to get excited about a new release: Alien is a great movie, Thelma and Louise is nothing special, White Squall is pants, and G.I. Jane was surprisingly good, but I'm the only person who seems to think so. With this track record, as I walked into Gladiator I was less expectant than Adam Sandler on Oscar night. It turned out to be worse than I thought.
Gladiator is an epic-by-numbers. Sweeping shots over cities, a couple of thousand extras wearing togas, a few seconds in a battle scene where the music turns to silence and the direct-o-matic uses a different shutter speed... Seen it all before. While everyone else was dropping their jaws, my thumbs got busy with the twiddling.
If you're going to make a movie where the audience can root for the underdog, you should at least blur the lines a little. Gladiator's heroic goodies and hissable baddies are so obvious even Spielberg would have complained. For the Autobots, we have Russell Crowe. He gets fired from his job, sentenced to death, manages to escape only to find his wife raped and his children murdered, is sold into slavery, forced to perform in front of bloodthirsty crowds as a gladiator, loses his car keys and steps on a dog poo. For the Decepticons, we have Joaquim Phoenix, who killed his own dad, ordered the deaths of Crowe and his family, forces people to fight and die for his entertainment, wants to do his sister, and kicks puppies in the teeth. It's as balanced as a see-saw with Jabba the Hutt on one end and Calista Flockhart on the other.
It has pretensions above the action movie it knows it really is, and it's at those points that the film moves from boring to laughable. We're told, over and over again, that gladiator fights are brutal, that the crowds are disgusting for watching, and that the men are unwilling to take part. It was at this point I phoned Amnesty International to see what we could do to stop this barbaric sport. Are we really learning anything by this? It's in these moments, too, that the film's hypocrisy becomes obvious. While the viewers are weeping at the injustice of it all, they're also excited by Crowe's muscular heroics, and the slo-mo, pop-promo style used for the bloody fight scenes. We can condemn the audience in the colosseum for enjoying it, while happily stuffing popcorn down our faces and cheering when Crowe stabs another gladiator. Is he the only one fighting against his will, or are the people he kills innocent victims too? Who cares? We've moved past the pathos now, we're on to the fight scenes. Carry on Cleo had more emotional impact.
The ending is as predictable as possible. Did anyone really think it would end with Phoenix still in power? The only good thing about the ending was that it actually had one. Three weeks into the movie I was starting to have my doubts. Overlong, over-rated, add it to the list of undeserving modern classics.