Ridley Scott's artificial epic isn't very impressive

Rating: 3/10 (22 November 2010)

Ridley Scott's Oscar-winning ersatz epic is one of the least spectacular big-screen spectacles ever sold to an undemanding public: a sand-and-sandal throwback stripped of the genre's all too necessary guilty pleasures. The idea was to recreate for today's digital generation a wide-screen Roman Empire costume drama from Hollywood's pre-video adolescence, but all the fancy computer imagery (and state-of-the-art budget) only makes the new film look and sound more solemn and pompous than its beefcake role models. Worse yet, the occasional token nod toward old-fashioned visual grandeur isn't enough to camouflage the claustrophobic TV screen compositions and typically frantic Madison Avenue editing job (designed, perhaps, to hide the digital wrinkles).
Russell Crowe is the title character: a Roman general fallen from imperial favor, battling for his life and honor on the floor of the Coliseum, where the prize for victory is another day of slavery and the cost of defeat is a mercifully quick death. Crowe's protagonist is a man of few words, most of them delivered in a flat monotone, matching the equally colorless photography, shaded in picturesque hues of misty gray and mud brown sepia.
Don't expect any surprises from the strictly formula riches-to-rags-to-rebel hero scenario, which doesn't even allow the villains (degenerate emperor Joaquin Phoenix and his sister/lover Connie Nielson) a chance to have any fun. Audiences (and too many critics, who should have known better) conditioned by habit to reject anything original made the film a worldwide hit, but even in our current age of diminished expectations it should have been clear that they don't make 'em like they used to anymore.