The fun irony is that the feckless Commodus has brought the gladiators to Rome as a bread-and-circuses initiative to distract the great unwashed while he seizes total authority over the empire. When Maximus is picked up by slavers in Zucchabar, a Roman city that would now be in Algeria, and he’s forced to battle to the death alongside other gladiators – first in local events and later in the Colosseum, where he becomes a sensation. Commodus condemns Maximus to a quiet execution in the forest, orders his family murdered and sets about engineering the dissolution of the senate and a comprehensive quashing of dissent.Ĭonnie Nielsen and Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator.
But that means passing over his vile, sadistic failson, Commodus (Phoenix), who craves the unfettered power of an emperor and unnaturally shortens his father’s life to get it. In exchange for his service to the empire, he wants a little time off – those fields ain’t gonna harvest themselves, you know? But he gets caught up in circumstances beyond his control: the dying Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) wants him as a placeholder to boost the senate and lead Rome toward democratic rule. There’s a lot to draw the eye away from the central action in Scott’s films – Orlando Bloom, for example, doesn’t have the presence to draw focus in Kingdom of Heaven – but Crowe’s General Maximus Decimus Meridius has a simple and well-defined mission, and the actor plays it as righteous as a sword plunged straight to the hilt.Ĭontrasting the scorched earth of Germania, where Maximus leads his men in one final push against the barbarians (“At my signal, unleash hell!”), with the golden fields of home, where his wife and son await after his years away, Gladiator begins with a patriot’s humble request. The benefit of Crowe’s Oscar-winning lead performance – and a script (by David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson) that was geared around it – is that he makes it impossible to get lost in the hectic atmosphere Scott conjures here from hundreds of extras, digital landscapes and assorted period bric-a-brac. Photograph: Fred Prouser/Reutersįor director Ridley Scott, it started a run of enervating historical action-dramas that included Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood and Exodus: Gods and Kings, none of which had the same propulsive kick. Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Djimon Hounsou and Russell Crowe at the Gladiator premiere. It’s a terrific summer movie, and one of the new century’s least deserving best picture winners. But the argument that the film is any deeper than the red-meat savagery it delivers doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Again, this is not a mark against the film, because it’s mostly rousing on these terms, boosted by a Roman succession plot that plays one man’s epic revenge quest to the highest of stakes. It’s about our hero first belting his way through a colorful array of opponents – barrel-chested goons, armor-plated archers on chariots, man-eating tigers emerging from the arena floor – before finally battling the villain on hostile turf and turning the home crowd to his favor, against the will of a brutal authoritarian government. The competitive arc of Gladiator is Rocky III leading into Rocky IV. Yet this is essentially about an undersized warrior gutting his way to a title bout – all else seems like window-dressing by comparison. The palace intrigue that follows the death of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius may give the film a certain amount of sophistication, as do the performances by Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix and Connie Nielsen, who all make excellent and multi-layered contributions. Twenty years later, perhaps it’s time to take Gladiator back to its original framing, not as the spoiler to Steven Soderbergh’s unlikely coronation as a Hollywood director – his Erin Brockovich and Traffic were best picture nominees, and he won best director for the latter – but as a classed-up underdog sports movie, like a middle-period Rocky sequel in sandals and tunics.
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