Product: Gladiator [VHS] (2000)
Rating: 5.0
Gladiator -- Best of old and new
Oliver Reed, Richard Harris, Derek Jacobi. Morituri te salutamus indeed! The R rating is for blood (fake, of course, but well done) and your kids have seen worse on TV. There is no sex or even bad language! The growling tigers are the best I've seen on film since Sheena QOJ in the 50's! For a Dreamworks production, this film is surprisingly free of political undertones (except of the anti-Gore ilk, if you'll forgive the pun), unlike the (for interracial sex in the first 10 minutes) 15REW-rated The Perfect Storm. It's just a plain good action movie, not unlike Mel Gibson's Oscar-winning BRAVEHEART, his PATRIOT, and Spielberg's last decent film the Oscar-winning SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. The action is surrounded by and laced with excellent acting in the best British tradition. The two newbies, Joaquin Phoenix and Connie Nielsen, are good additions to the seasoned cast. Phoenix, with his harelip scar, is destined to be typecast as a slimeball, I'm afraid, but he does it well. Nielsen, a Sela Ward lookalike, holds up her role as the only sexy personage in the film very well. And speaking of scars, the perfectly-scarfaced Tommy Flanagan reappears as Cicero, Russell Crowe's aide-de-camp. (He was Mel Gibson's aide-de-camp in Braveheart, the prima-nocte-"offended husband.") This DVD was well-worth the $$ spent for it.