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"Gladiator" | page 1, 2
Maybe the plummy BBC accents adopted by Phoenix and the Danish-born Nielsen are intended to make them seem plausibly related to the Anglo-Irish Harris, but the effect is somewhere between Monty Python and an ambitious college production of "Antony and Cleopatra." I don't know what Scott was thinking when he cast Derek Jacobi in a minor role (as a senator devoted to restoring the lost Roman republic). All it accomplishes is to remind us that "I, Claudius" (for you youngsters, the British TV miniseries in which Jacobi starred in the '70s) successfully achieved the kind of dense melodrama suggested by "Gladiator," but at a tiny fraction of the movie's budget and with vastly superior writing. In the great tradition of improbable movie villainy, Commodus doesn't have Maximus simply and efficiently killed, but insists that several soldiers transport him miles away, providing him ample opportunity to escape. Struggling home to Spain to find his farm burned and his wife and child grotesquely slaughtered, Maximus somehow -- I'm frankly not sure how, and neither are the filmmakers -- winds up in the African gladiator training camp belonging to Proximo (Oliver Reed). A veteran of many cheesy costume dramas, Reed seems to relish this slimy Mediterranean tycoon role. "I did not spend good money on you for your company," Proximo crows to his musclebound trainees. "I spent it to profit from your deaths!" For a while, at least, "Gladiator" sheds its dour pretensions and slides toward the enjoyable-trash vein exemplified by Victor Mature in "Demetrius and the Gladiators" or Steve Reeves in "Hercules Unchained." From here on out, we're talking Schwarzeneggerian dudes in fearsome masks and little skirts, African charioteer babes in body-hugging armor, ravenous tigers and cries of "We who are about to die salute you!" Buoyed by his friendship with Juba, Maximus defeats all comers in Africa and makes it to the big show in the Roman Colosseum, where, of course, he gets many opportunities to humiliate the sinister but incompetent Commodus. (Phoenix never actually utters the phrase "Thufferin' thuccotash!" but his performance implies it.) You could argue that it's a waste for an actor of Crowe's caliber to play the kind of role customarily filled by retired bodybuilders, but at least the grandiose fight sequences keep your mind off the torpid, recycled plot. It may be that Scott and his screenwriters (David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson) think that the decadent Roman Empire depicted in "Gladiator" has some contemporary relevance. But such comparisons are inherently dimwitted; there has never been an age in human history that resisted vulgar spectacle, and very few that didn't see themselves as in some way a decline from earlier eras. Sure, the public will settle for bread and circuses most of the time, but, folks, it was ever thus. The real story of compromise and decline here belongs to Ridley Scott, who can find no better use for his ample talents than this grandiose but vacant entertainment.
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