Good, but a poor man's Spartacus

Rating: 7/10 (2 August 2001)

"Gladiator" is a good action movie, but it's overrated. The battle sequences in the Colisseum are excellent, but outside of those scenes the film moves too slowly and is too long. I rate it 7. Russell Crowe's character is fighting for an ideal that is never really explained (what - a slightly less oppressive Roman Empire?), and so some of the drama seemed thin to me. Basically, Stanley Kubrick's "Spartacus" (1960) does everything "Gladiator" wants to do, and does it much better (including the fact that Spartacus is fighting for the more noble cause of ending slavery).