The 2001 GOLDEN GLOBES may best be remembered as the night that 78-year DAME ELIZABETH TAYLOR drew out the presentation of the Best Dramatic Film of the Year Award by first half-mangling the envelope containing the name of the winning film before being admonished by stagehands and production staff to announce the full slate of candidates first: Erin Brockovich, Wonder Boys, etc.. Eventually, she tore open the already half-mangled enveloped and extracted the card…and then issued forth with a high-pitched squeal of delight:
"And the winner is…GLAAAADIATOR!!"
The audience cheered. Dick Clark looked ashen and rolled his eyes—and I must confess I groaned (and not due to my empathy for poor Elizabeth's Biden-moment-like seeming cognitive infirmity gone live on national TV).
I groaned because I had recently come back from a lengthy European tour and needed to find out what all the hoo-hah was about this Gladiator thingy, the most recent cinematic gloss on ye olde Swords-and-Sandals genre, featuring Russell Crowe in a decidedly low-energy turn (his off-the-cuff mumbled "Upon my signal—unleash Hell" line being the biggest hoot of the film). And to think that THIS GUY was considered by critics and audiences of the day to be the finest actor of those years?? The whole picture stank, imho. My cup runneth over with scorn.
Now, we the commoners, of course, have grown up over many years with proper Ancient Roman displays of gratuitous violence and barbarism on the silver screen—going back to Francis X. Bushman’s and Ramon Novarro's 1926 turn in Ben Niblo's Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ…through Charles Laughton's decadent campy swish-athon as Emperor Nero in Mervyn Leroy's shockingly bloody (for 1951) Quo Vadis…touching on Stanley Kubrick's superb 1960 Spartacus with Kirk Douglas in top form …and on up through the mega-Brit 1976 television version of Robert Graves's I Claudius featuring Derek Jacobi (who is in both Gladiator's).
And truth to be told, methinks there is way more life in any of these aforementioned filmic and televised versions than in either Gladiator.
Once a world-class director with credits such as Blade Runner and Alien, Ridley Scott should seriously consider quitting at this point (ditto Francis Ford Coppola).
I mean, do either of these guys need any more buckets of ducats showered on their bloated productions??
I hate to say this because I adore Scott's early science fiction films (as well as Coppola's masterful early films like The Conversation). But like Coppola, Scott really seems way past his sell-by date, given the current climate.
Last year's Napoleon was a shameful embarrassment. Good old eccentric Joaquin Phoenix (and hey, I'm his fan, kind of) stumbling around Egypt firing loose cannonades aimed at the Sphinx (which never happened, which is true of at least 80% of the script according to the Napoleonic Code of worldwide historians and academics devoted to the Telling of Historical Truths, forsooth).
"Won't you JOIN ME?" was one of the plum moments plucked for the worldwide TV ad for Napoleon. Indeed. (A variant of this line is spoken by Paul Mescal in Gladiator in a bit of self-referential Ridley Scott-ism. Maybe they are gonna use that in the new TV ballyhoo to be rolled out this week. Would make sense, in an exhortatory kind of way).
This here movie is just a Holy Roman Empirical Mess. The CGI looks dated (blood-thirsty baboons, sharks, and rhinos cavorting in the Coliseum, notwithstanding). The soundtrack speaks in tongues, the principal actors boasting a mish-mosh of accents like in a badly-dubbed Steve Reeves Italian spectacle picture from the '60s. Denzel Washington sounds like he just stepped off the IRT, Irish hunk Paul Mescal sports the traces of his Trinity College acting school, and Pedro Pascal sounds and facially looks like he stepped out of the wrong epoch entirely.
Yet the film will run and run. It ticks all the boxes: Gross arterial spray? Check! Overly verbose exposition of key plot points? Check! Dialogue that sounds like it was run through an AI filter to remove all traces of anything resembling the way people might actually have conversed in those days? Check! And THAT my friends is Entertainment!
I was dying for the film to cut loose into pure burlesque on the order of "J. Caesar" (a one-act 19th-century farce I played Mark Anthony in up at Camp Kennebec in the early '60s).
You know, Cris Shapan-like cut-and-thrust parody/folderol:
That would have been way, way better than this po-faced exercise in Blockbuster 101. You know, camp it up!
When Pedro Pascal gets the crown of laurels put on his head publicly near the beginning of the film as a reward for his most recent rape, pillage, and slaughter, Scott should have had a member of the royal Roman retinue gasp and shout out:
"HE WEARETH THE HEAD-GEAR OF THE KING!!"
You know—foreshadowing shit.
In summa—there is more life in one frame of Howard Hawks's 1955 laff-riot Land of the Pharaohs starring Jack Hawkins and Joan Collins with a script by an in-his-cups William Faulkner than in the whole 144 minutes of this eye-and-ear-sore.
One redeeming feature: Dead Can Dance's Lisa Gerrard's name pops up in the soundtrack credits, which was nice—so hey, I'm not a TOTAL curmudgeon here.
But overall, THUMBS WAY WAY DOWN.