Gladiator

Herald rating: * * * *

Cast: Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Oliver Reed

Director: Ridley Scott

Rating: M (medium level violence)

Running Time: 155 minutes

Opens: Previews this weekend at Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas, opens Thursday

Review: Russell Baillie

By rights, we should be immune to Gladiator. It's not just that a Roman epic feels like a relic of another Hollywood age, there are other factors against it.

Its story about an honourable Roman general who loses it all, only to become an indentured star attraction at the Colosseum's sword-swingin' version of Wrestle-mania, is an oldie but not necessarily a goodie.

It comes with lines like, "What we do in life echoes in eternity," "In this life or next I will have my vengeance," and "We who are about to die, salute you" which suggests its writers thought: "These people spoke Latin so we better give them real important stuff to say, huh?"

As well, the last time director Scott touched anything military, it was GI Jane, a movie that the lions threw back.

And of the various creaky Brit thespians involved in this — including Derek Jacobi in a nice new toga and briefly Richard Harris as the wise old emperor Marcus Aurelius — one actually popped his sandals during the shoot.

Funnily enough, the late Oliver Reed, as gladiator manager-coach-owner Proximo, whose scenes were completed with computer trickery, was already having a special effect on the movie before he became one.

Gladiator is also long and in not quite a don't-know-where-the-time-went kind of way. It can get ponderous, in the stylised flashback scenes for Crowe's General Maximus remembering his family life down on the farm, or the episodes set in Rome's corridors of power involving Marcus' ruthless son Com-modus (Phoenix), his sister Lucilla (Nielsen) and a senate naturally keen to see the restoration of democracy after the old emperor's death. They rather bog things down.

But the factors in favour of Gladiator tip the balance. All the way, in fact, towards this being something just short of a movie marvel and quite the best thing you're likely to see this blockbuster season.

Everything you've possibly heard about Crowe's volcanic performance of a good man who has suffered unspeakable wrongs is true. He's terrific — whether he's commanding his legions in the spectacular early battle scenes, delivering those earnest lines with utter conviction, or fighting for his own survival and revenge in a circus of blood.

Add to that the visual detail and the atmosphere that Scott manages to evoke and you're almost too busy taking in the scenery of 180AD to worry about its peripheral clumsiness. Scott makes Rome both grandiose and gritty — and the same could be said of his leading man's portrayal.

Yes, by rights we should be immune to Crowe's particular ex-Legionnaires' Disease. But it's infectious. And so we, who are about to nearly die laughing at Gladiator's occasional flaws but revel in its spectacle, salute you.

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Gladiator