An astonishingly overrated movie

Rating: 5/10 (1 February 2001)

I wanted to like this movie. It got good reviews, it was set in Rome, it seemed like it had everything going for it.
But, unfortunately, such was not to be the case.
This movie was, quite simply, bad.
The plot is pathetic. It's basically a nonsensical mish-mash of supposedly momentous events, padding up the time between Russell Crowe brutally slaughtering his opponents in various inventive and completely unbelievable ways (yes, really, those Roman swords did chop through bone like it was tissue paper, I'll believe that.)
The action is, for the most part, just a celebration of the power of the filmmaker to create violence even more brutal (and at the same time, more antiseptic - lots of blood, lots of cutting, no guts) than reality. The true core of the movie isn't character, plot, or even Russell Crowe showing off a few muscles. It's amputated limbs, heads, torsos. The rest of the film is just a pathetic shell around numerous scenes whose only purpose is a celebration of hollywood's antiseptic version of the macabre. Blood, dirt, death. But no guts.
The special effects are poor. A few shots of Rome are attempted, but they look like nothing more than CGI drawings with some legions pasted on top. Even the best attempt, an aerial flyover attempting to portray the daily life of a bustling city, is just a quick glance from a strangled camera angle, and gives the impression more of a robotic ant farm than a great, bustling city of the ancient world.
Perhaps, one might think, the fight scenes fare better. After all, they are the only reason for the movie's existence. But they don't. Despite being patently unbelievable and absurd, they also manage to be rather poorly shot and boring. There's never any real vitality to them. Somehow, Ridley Scott has managed to turn human brutality into something that looks like nothing more than a special effect, and a poor one at that. The video jerks in a strange, stop-motion filming effect that makes each fight look like it was done in claymation, while the arena, the stadium, the crowd all look somehow smaller than life, phony, unreal.
Don't bother.