find something better to do

Rating: 3/10 (25 January 2007)

If "epic" equates with "tedium" then this is indeed a classic of the genre. Every so often there's a shot that reminds you that Kubrick was involved - for example, a breathtaking long shot against an amazing sky in which Spartacus carries his wife on horseback from one side of the screen to the other across the ridge of a hill - but most of the time the entire enterprise is wallowing in an over-emotionalism that renders it mostly difficult and usually impossible for the audience - well, this audience, at least - to feel anything at all.
The very guilty party is Kirk Douglas. There is a scene towards the end of the film when he is addressing his slave army, and the scene alternates with Olivier addressing Rome: the difference in quality is palpable. Poor old Douglas doesn't have a hope, he is so greatly outclassed. Now, I have seen Douglas be very good indeed: he is excellent in Wilder's "Ace in the Hole", to name just one of his movies, so I'm not an unqualified loather of his work. It's just that here, where he was apparently producer as well as star, we have a film that was made according to his taste, and his taste is lousy. There are good moments, but he's rarely in them: they feature Olivier, Laughton, Ustinov and Lom. The wonderful Jean Simmons copes pretty well with her poorly-written part. The early fight sequences in the gladiator training camp are good too, and promised better things to come, a promise sadly unfulfilled. As we discovered in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, too many battle scenes make for emotional numbness. Which brings me to Alex North's score, to which the same applies: there's just too much of it, and so much of it the same.
The epic movie as a genre is, I'll admit, something I find very hard to take. It generally requires you to believe in unflawed heroism, which I find an uncomfortable, nigh-on dangerous idea. In the case of Spartacus, this is somewhat redeemed by the film's reaching for a tragic ending, and it is here that Douglas' performance begins, far too late, to turn into something to which one can relate. In his climactic fight with Curtis (a star actor strangely wasted in this film) the impossibility of Spartacus' position gives the actor something to chew on other than the scenery, and the outcome is the kind of emotion sadly lacking elsewhere. The same is I don't think quite true of the final scene between Douglas and Simmons: "The Life of Brian" has perhaps intervened too powerfully for such a scene ever to be truly poignant again. But Simmons and Douglas try very hard to make it happen. Unsurprisingly, it's when the intervention comes of Ustinov's all-too-human, hitherto comic character that the scene starts to mean something. If you can spare the hours of your life to watch this kind of thing, then fine. But having sat through it myself now, I honestly think you'd be better off walking in the park.