Product: Gladiator [VHS] (2000)
Rating: 4.0
Good, but not quite what I expected.
Overall, Gladiator was a good movie, though it did have it's problems. For one, it passed itself off as an action flick and turned out to be more or less a drama. With a title like Gladiator, you'd expect more than 5 good fighting scenes over the course of two and a half hours. The fight scenes were good, except the camera wouldn't say on one spot long enough. It was very dizzying and jumpy. The veiwer got the idea of what happened, but missed out on a lot of detail. The conversation with his friend about each other's families was just a tad too much foreshadowing for the ending. The ending was very nicely done, one of the best parts of the movie as he's making his way into the Elysium Fields. Between fights, it was just a lot of dialouge. Not unnecessary dialough exactly, but presented in a rather bland manner. Commodus shouldn't have been written so whiny and cowardly, and Maximus should've showed more of the emotion that was obviously present in him. A good movie worth seeing, but don't watch it with any prior expectations.