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FIRST IMPRESSIONS
When Roman general Maximus is betrayed and his family murdered by the emperor's corrupt son Commodus, he gets his chance for revenge when he comes to Rome as a gladiator.
I don't like to use the word "overrated", but I certainly couldn't get into Gladiator as much as everyone else seems to. Why? Well, several reasons.
For one thing, I'm not a Russell Crowe fan. I've always found him soporifically bland, and this is no exception.
The movie does so little to effectively establish its many plot threads that the whole thing just seems unfocused. Even Maximus's central quest for revenge ends up getting lost in a sea of other wrestling plot points. Some of them did perk my interest, like the Senate's plan to get rid of Commodus, but nothing ever comes of that. The third act in particular devolves into a completely disjointed mess; I was just thinking, "What do any of these events have to do with each other?" And how does Commodus find out about the scheme against him?
The fight scenes are some of the worst ever! This is one of those movies that succumbs to the sad cliché of over-editing, so sometimes I couldn't even tell what was going on.
I really wanted to love this movie, but in the end it just came off to me as okay at best. I liked parts of it, but they were just a few bright spots in an otherwise confusing, pretentious mess.
My rating: 60%
