Russell Crowe is amazing as Maximus, the titular character, but I can't help noting that his performance would have been greatly enhanced by the strategic loss of his pants, or even just his shirt. For a movie set in ancient Rome, there isn't much skin. Director Ridley Scott was quoted as saying, "Orgies are boring," but come on, give me a shower scene or something! Crowe only has his shirt off ONCE, and then only for a few seconds -- is that realistic? It gets pretty hot in Italy, after all. Okay, Djimon Hounsou is often shirtless and has a fine body, but I came to see Russell.
Well, enough criticism. This movie kicks imperial ass. My friend Anne asked me before the movie, "Will there be beheadings?" and the answer is, "yes, plenty" (just a warning for the squeamish). A breathtaking battle scene opens the film, marred only by Ridley Scott's moronic insistence on slo-mo. If there's a more majestic sight than Russell Crowe astride a horse in full battle regalia, wolf skin draped across his shoulders, I don't want to see it, because I would die on the spot from sheer awe. The gladiator fights are likewise impeccably staged, tense and exciting, especially the ones with tigers. I'm a sucker, as I'm sure many of you are, for the whole "glory that was Rome" thing, and the movie does a splendid job of recreating it. When you see that opening battle sequence, you wonder how these barbarians ever thought they could defeat a Roman army. Unusually for this day and age, most of Scott's backgrounds and crowds are not computer-generated, but solid and real (I heard he used 5,000 extras). When CGI is used, it's almost impossible to spot.
Yet Gladiator doesn't rely solely on bloody action. It's got an engaging, personal story at the core, with gifted actors who can handle both the physical and emotional demands of their roles. Joaquin Phoenix is surprisingly impressive as the evil emperor Commodus. I wasn't expecting much, considering I remembered him mostly from To Die For, in which he played an inarticulate teen so withdrawn that he was practically inside out. But he's terrific here. Crowe -- and I'm not biased at all -- is marvelous as the honorable general-turned-gladiator Maximus (and he is the most!).
I enjoyed the movie tremendously, but the dialogue and plot are hokey and melodramatic. In that way, it reminds you a lot of past sword-and-sandal epics, which is sometimes good... and sometimes not. And Ridley Scott needs to get a grip. So much of this movie tries to be arty and stylized, and it falls flat. He needs to get over himself as a director and just get out of the way and tell the story. The one thing he does do well, though, is give you a sense of where the action is taking place. I'm not sure how clearly I can explain this, but often these days, in a fight or chase sequence, as the film cuts from one portion of the fight to another, it can be hard to place the section in the context of the whole. For example, you see Person A skulking through corridors and Person B hunting for him, but you have no idea how close Person B is to Person A. Scott is very good at letting you know where you are in any given scene. It might seem like an odd thing to praise him for, but it seems to be a rare talent lately.
I have a few quibbles with the movie's grasp of Roman culture as well -- I am now an expert on it, having seen The Learning Channel's one-hour program on gladiators, hosted by a former Python (Terry Jones), so you know it's all true. Mainly, the film ascribes moral qualms over the spectacles in the Coliseum to people who probably wouldn't have had them. Also -- and this is a minor point -- I was a bit confused about which country Maximus' farm is in. Maximus is Spanish, but his farm lies somewhere that evidently has a huge desert between it and Germany, and his child speaks Italian, not Latin. (To give you an idea of how big a geek I was in high school, I competed in the Latin Olympics. And I won. In fact, I nearly missed my prom because it conflicted with the Latin Olympics; I guess they figured the overlap between kids competing in the Latin Olympics and kids attending the prom would be pretty minimal. Remember, Amy?)
Anyway, Gladiator opens Friday. Go see it. I don't care who you are, go see it. And see it in a theater with a good sound system, so that when horses gallop, the floor trembles, and you can almost feel the arrows zoom past you.
Finally, I want to give a shout out to Tiffany, who is the most awesome person I know right now: She met Kevin Spacey. And hugged Tobey Maguire and almost ran over Rob Lowe and was befuddled by Martin Sheen and had other adventures with a whole bunch of other celebrities when she scored a ticket to the White House Correspondents' Dinner. I am insanely jealous of her, and it doesn't make me feel better at all that I got not one but two Gladiator posters tonight (a big one and a little one), because she got to meet Kevin Spacey and I didn't even get to see Russell Crowe's ass.
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