GLADIATOR
Needs some tits, dammit!!!

  When Renny Harlin made Cutthroat Island, it was widely complained that it contained every pirate-movie cliché in the books.  I don't really think this is something to complain about; how many pirate movies does a man get to make in his lifetime?  Stuff in everything you can if you're only gonna get one shot, that's what I say.  Similar is the case with Ridley Scott's Gladiator; there have been a few historical battle epics in recent years, but this movie is rooted more firmly in the Conan-esque tradition of sword-and-sandal bonecrunchers which we haven't seen a lot of in a while, and if it's too much of a good thing, well, if you're gonna do some, you may as well do too much.

Russell Crowe stars as Maximus (pronounced max-i-MOOSE, surely prompting much ribbing from his childhood classmates), a barbarian-slaughterin' second-century Roman general who is offered by the dying Emperor (Richard Harris) the throne of the empire in trust until he can whip the Senate into being democratic again.  Crowe doesn't like this idea (we hear plenty about how he just wants to raise crops), and the Emperor's son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) likes it even less.  Commodus murders his father and assumes the throne, quickly ordering Maximus killed before he can spoil things.  Maximus escapes and beats hoof to his waiting family, but gets there too late to save them from execution.  (unbidden is sprung to mind an image of the Springfield Monorail's inventor apologizing "Sorry, I shouldn't have stopped for that haircut.")  Maxiumus collapses from exhaustion and awakens a slave, sold to retired gladiator Proximo (Oliver Reed), and since there's a scene early on which establishes Commodus as a fair swordsman in his own right, the rest of the film should be well spelled out for you.

Warts and all, this is still the most enjoyable and ambitious film Scott's put out in almost a dozen years.  Drawing equally from sword-swinging battle epics like Braveheart, virtual-city adventures like Dark City and even Saving Private Ryan, Gladiator is over two and a half hours that's light on plot and heavy on the visuals and bloodshed, and I didn't mind one bit that it's all too much.

Crowe is in expectedly fine form, affecting an English accent (even though he plays a Spaniard) which is well within the bounds for this sort of thing.  (generally, any western-Europe accent is considered acceptable for period-Europe in the movies, except French)  Phoenix is a snivelly whiner (probably mad at his father for naming him after a toilet) who gets one good (but still whiny) moment early in the film where he protests to his father that he has virtues previously uncounted, and he's one of the few actors here who actually looks Roman (what's with that freckle-faced kid?), but I would have liked to have seen the role go to somebody with a little more menace.  And Oliver Reed, who died during filming, gives as good a final bow as could be asked for; he was always a ham, but he was a great ham when he was on, and here he's on, never going so far over the top that he starts chewing the scenery.  A few scenes had him digitally inserted; I'm not sure which ones, if that gives you any idea of how good the job was.

Ridley Scott gives it his all, and with a hundred million bucks to back him up, that's quite a bit.  Rome is presented in a glory so (ahem) colossal that you'd have to be awfully attached to the one we have not to want to trade it in. (bad sewage in the Greek quarter or no)  The battle scenes are filmed with that grainy, jittery, rapid-cut look which was employed so well in the bloodsoaked bookends of Saving Private Ryan; here, it doesn't work quite as well (such an approach works better to frighten and confuse than to excite), and there could've been a lot less of it in the actual gladiatorial fights, but still, it's hard not to be stirred.  Also stirring is the score by Hans Zimmer (and two others), which doesn't lose its effectiveness even once you figure out he's just plagiarizing Vangelis' score for 1492: Conquest Of Paradise.

Plot, as I said, is fairly thin.  I've long had a bit of a personal beef with gladiator movies in that they're too much like sports movies (which I find somehow more boring than the sports themselves).  The events in the ring are there to chew up time, provide some action without anything at stake (zzzzz), and maybe make for one less character for which to be provided stupid dialogue by six writers.  There are exceptions where the combats are integral to the plot (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome), but for the most part, unless the action's really killer, it's actually these scenes that one should keep in mind when trying to find a moment to sneak out to the can.  Fortunately, the action here is killer.

There isn't a single reference to that growing cult of Christians in this movie, and maybe that's just as well, since they were none too well-regarded at the time and it'd be tough to make an American audience root for the guys who kept feeding them to lions (and tigers) (and wolves).  A number of other things are messed around with; much has been made of the confusion over the thumbs in/thumbs out does he live/does he die issue, and while it's annoying now that I actually know about it, it's hard to care about such a trivial detail.  I'm more concerned with character details, like the hopelessly unaffecting scene of the murder of Maximus' family; we basically saw the same thing in Braveheart, but at least there we got to get an idea of what our hero was losing.  At least that's out of the way quickly.

Gladiator seems to be winning over audiences all over the place, although critics have met it more mildly.  Too dour, too historically inaccurate, too...ah, but I think it's the point of a film like this to be "too".  Who the hell wants to see a gladiator movie that refuses to tap into the excess of gladiatorial spectacle itself?  That the script makes a point of chastising audiences for reveling in the carnage is silly and amusingly hypocritical, since after all, it's carnage that script is all too willing to provide, but I think viewers can tell the difference between getting a kick out of fictitious bloodshed and the real thing.

And what's with the absence of nudity?  All I ask for from a sword-and-sandal adventure is blood, steel, fire and tits.  There are no tits here, and I for one am appalled.  I had to go home and get my nudity fix from that awful piece of crap Meridian.  This would not have been necessary if Scott had just done his duty and put some tits in this movie.

Still, Gladiator is an enjoyable blood-spraying bone-crunching film with enough visuals and moments of excitement to please just about anyone who's curious.  It ain't gonna change the world, but it'll probably send you out of the theater nicely wired.  

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