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Gladiator opens with Russell Crowe preparing to beat the crap out of a bunch of pesky barbarians. (We know they're barbarians because they yammer in gibberish and don't shave. Ridley Scott is a subtle bastard.) Eventually they are subdued, done in my Russell Crowe's "scoop up a bunch of earth with your hand" technique. (Hereafter referred to as the internationally recognized "Russell Crowe is about to beat the crap out of you sign.") The catapults also completed the vital task of knocking down all the trees and setting clumps of dirt on fire. For his part, the cameraman tossed the camera up and down twenty times and fell over twice. (This is known as "cinematography.") After this great victory, Maximus (Russell Crowe) is offered the Roman Empire by dying emperor Peter O'Toole, who has made a second career out of such roles. It gets more convincing every time. (Unfortunately, he more resembles a "I'm dying after drinking whiskey out of a paper bag for fifty years" rather than a dying Emperor. But you can't win 'em all.) Maximus, being a moron, decides he needs more time to think. In the interval the emperor, always an efficient time manager, decides to tell his overtly psychopathic son, Joquin Phoenix, that he's disinheriting him and that, no, he hasn't told anyone. When O'Toole's corpse turns up, Phoenix declares himself emperor and orders Maximus killed immediately. (He, too, took time management classes.) For future reference, if someone asks for a "clean death, a soldier's death," the answer is no. After escaping his captors, Maximus stops by seven eleven and drinks himself into a stupor. (This scene is available only on the DVD.) He then totters towards his villa and collapses. Upon regaining consciousness, he finds that his family's dead, he's being sold as a slave in North Africa, and there's this bigass gash on his arm. I HATE it when that happens. Being Russell Crowe, however, he soon works his way back to Rome by slashing hapless dolts that are very much like himself, only aren't played by Russell Crowe and are hence expendable. (Having the scriptwriter on your side has got to kick ass.) Soon he's fighting Joquin Phoenix himself. Sure, some extraneous stuff happens along the way -- Maximus stomps on a few more peons at the Coliseum (Rome's only equal opportunity employer), a few senators get killed, some Irish guy gets hanged, and his trainer gets stabbed by Roman soldiers who apparently weren't sure where the vital organs were and wanted to be thorough (hence the need for all thirty of them to go at him at once) -- but that's about all I can tell you. I fast-forwarded the parts with the dialogue. (Especially the parts in which Phoenix wonders why no one loves him. What's a patricidal psychopath with a keen interest in his sister's anatomy to do?) Anyway, the Emperor forgets that he's just played by some random Phoenix and not Russell Crowe, so he goes for broke and gets his ass handed to him. Chalk up another victim to the scoop up the dirt trick. Then his sister says something about "the dream that was Rome," the music swells, and they all live happily ever after. Until the barbarians sack Rome, anyway. |