Terrifyingly overrated movie

Rating: Null/10 (31 May 2003)

How this movie is being widely accepted as a "masterpiece" is beyond me. Frankly, the only good thing I can say about this movie is J.Phoenix' performance - IMHO, he was great, as always.
However, which is more than I can say for R.Crowe. The poster, who mentioned R.Crowe's range of "two expressions - arrogant & silly", was dead on, at least for this movie. I can see that Crowe did a great job by preparing for the role physically - i.e. growing muscles and all that, but his actual performance raised no emotions in me. Neither did the rest of the movie (with a possible exception of Phoenix' Commodus, as I mentioned above). The plot was predictable and ludicrous - oh, poor guy's family is killed (hmm... wonder where I have seen that before? Oh, yeah - in at least dozen of frickin'. Similar. Flicks.). So he's off to his revenge mission. And he gets his revenge by fighting the emperor in the gladiators ring. Now stop for a moment, please, and think about it. A slave (and I'm not even going into the fact that a roman of his position can't possibly stay a slave when his identity is known) challenges an emperor to a duel. Please. I'm not usually the one who bitches about and picks apart the inaccuracy of loosely-history-based movies, but the stupidity of these plot points is too much glaring. I can't take the events seriously, when they pretend to be realistic and accurate, but are not. For the f**k's sake, such final battle would fit in "Rocky", but here is too absurd. Once again I have to quite one of the previous posters with an analogy of fight between Bush and a prisoner. 'Cause that's what was going at the end of "Gladiator".
So, to sum up - acting: mostly meh; character development: practically non-existing; dialogues/writing: you call that writing??? special effects/fights/visual: these were good, of course (since this is a supposedly Epic. Hollywood. Movie!!!). But that's not why I watch movies. I watch movies for characters and plot. Alas, I wasn't able to find neither in this so-called masterpiece. So if you're at least tiny bit like me, I'm taking an unpopular stance and saying: don't waste your time on this movie. Even watching it purely for the visual side isn't worth it - there are much better movies with equally good effects and fights.