Such a Mixed Bag

Rating: 5/10 (21 June 2000)

I absolutely love Ridley Scott. "Alien" and "Blade Runner" both rank among my favorite films. "Gladiator," though, just didn't work for me.
Russell Crowe is a fantastic actor, and really ought to be a big, big, big star. Unfortunately, he's not given much to do here. He fights, he broods, he whines...but he's never really forced to stretch his talents.
My main quibble, I suppose, is that the movie was clearly going for "Braveheart" effect, and it fails. It was easy to get some sympathy going for Mel Gibson's character in "Braveheart." He was fighting for freedom and justice. Sadly for "Gladiator," it's pretty hard to develop much sympathy for any particular faction within the Roman empire. Where "Braveheart" was able to give us a few effective hallucinations and dream sequences, "Gladiator" shoves it down our throat with oddly-colored, tripping-on-acid dream sequences every five minutes. Yes, we get the point. He misses his family, and he'll see them in the afterlife. Move on already!
Apart from the dream sequences, the movie does look pretty spectacular. The Colliseum is an impressive sight. The costumes, for once in a sword-and-sandal epic, don't look like the costume department simply raided the bedding department at K-Mart. And the fight scenes are, indeed, entertaining and visceral.
In the end, though, the movie is less than the sum of its parts.