Rated: 15
Running time: 155 mins
The well-oiled Hollywood marketing machine steps into the arena for this summer's biggest fight.
It's famous because of two things: one, that revered drinker Oliver Reed died in the making and two, that it offers us a piece of filmmaking that is at once breathtaking and reassuring.
Let's get this straight: Gladiator is a superb film. Director Ridley Scott (Blade Runner and er? GI Jane) paints an epic picture that echoes the 1959 Ben Hur and Spartacus (1960) but which does so with a modernity to set it apart. Slightly.
With a battle scene complete with the Braveheart / Saving Private Ryan photography we can now associate with 'realism', Gladiator marks its territory as a return to epic values. Which is no bad thing. The subject matter somehow seems more honest than previous summer blockbusters and the harsh portrayal is about as far from the Arnie / Stallone outings of the nineties as we could hope to get.
And it's hard to fault any part of the film. Russell Crowe makes for an imposing general turned slave turned gladiator (as we are reminded when the young Emperor of Rome churns out what must have been the film's primary thirty second pitch). Crowe's physical presence convinces us from the first frame that this is an actor who could well command an army, far outstripping as he does the likes of Gibson and Ford.
Crowe is supported with unparalleled brilliance by the likes of Richard Harris, Derek Jacoby and the late Oliver Reed. It can only (and it only has) add to the film's weighty presence that Reed gives us his last performance - and a brilliant one at that as his character outshines all but Crowe's. Indeed, only these two characters are allowed to really develop.
Director Ridley Scott opts to focus, instead, upon developing his beautiful but overwhelmingly Hovis style of cinematography. Ad man will have a field day recreating the fields of wheat and barley as they struggle to associate their shampoos and cereals with the valour of ancient Rome's unwilling heroes. And it's a shame as everything else about the film tugs and lifts in all the right places.
Yet given a choice between Gladiator and the upcoming Mission: Impossible 2, a second outing to the former is recommended. Hollywood soul is at least more soul that can be achieved by the likes of Tom Cruise.
In the end, however, we are left marvelling at how, after 100 years of cinema, special effects technology has developed to the point where we can now make films like we did 40 years ago.
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