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Ultimately, Gladiator is an honorable and inoffensive spectacle with nothing extraordinary to recommend it.
Though the digital effects lack the weight and conviction of their equivalents in old Cecil B. De Mille movies, Ridley Scott's sword-and-sandal epic has some of the intensity of old Hollywood in terms of storytelling, spectacle, and violence.
The Roman costume drama, all dressed to the IX's, has taken a long holiday from the big screen.
Gladiator doesn't have enough plot to be a Roman epic ... and too much plot to be a summer action movie.
Without Russell Crowe's dynamism holding it all together, Gladiator might have devolved into a rash of overblown pandering.
Gladiator derides 'entertainment' while hustling like crazy to provide two and a half hours' worth of same. The heroism and the tigers and the epic grandeur all leave behind the flavor of cynicism.
Really excellent but really violent Oscar winner.
Russell Crowe is as believable a Spaniard here as Charlton Heston was a Mexican in "Touch of Evil." But director Ridley Scott took greater interest in entwining an empire's intrigue with its people's turmoil than emphasizing bread-and-circus brutality.
The remastering's absence of edge enhancement and more-intense colors are the most obvious differences. (Blu-ray Edition, Remastered)
...stirring action, good performances, and a plethora of visual delights.
The brutality has such a mythical grandeur that it occasionally resembles beauty.
Beefcake! Blood! Body slams! Boring! Boring? Well, not quite, but at 150 minutes, "Gladiator" isn't entirely the thrilling, action-packed Roman epic some fans of the genre were expecting.
Scott triumphantly transports us back to the Roman Empire circa 180 A.D. with a painter's eye for detail, a proven talent for manufacturing exotic realities (such as the future shock of Blade Runner) and a sweet tooth for utter spectacle.
If a gladiator film doesn't work as spectacle or as bloodthirsty action, what's left? Drama? It's dead on that level, too...
It's only fitting that Ridley Scott's gargantuan Roman epic would be housed on two discs, and there's not a single millimeter of wasted space.
The film is good, at times grizzly, fun -- of epic proportions.
A Roman version of Ben-Hur, Gladiator succeeds on only slightly more levels than it fails.
Notwithsdanding the blood, gore, and CG effects, this is an old-fashioned historical saga, a throwabck to the sand-and-sandals epics of Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur.
The cast is strong (notably Nielsen as Commodus's vacillating sister, and the late Oliver Reed, unusually endearing as a gladiator owner), the pacing lively, and the sets, swordplay and Scud catapults impressive.
Gladiator is a movie that while watching, you can enjoy; for a while.
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