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It's a Ridley Scott opus filmus featuring Russell Crowe as the Roman army general Maximus, who is demoted to a slave after he says, not hail, but to hell with Caesar.
Okay, so it's more complicated. Maximus is supposed to lead his army into Rome to make the autocratic government a republic again. But one betrayal leads to another.
His former employer is so cross with him that they burn alive his wife and kid, and sell him to a nasty slave owner in the sand-blasted North African desert.
Consumed by revenge, Maximus survives the arid gladiator circus as a celebrated hero, then graduates to the Roman Coliseum big league as a featured attraction. He's like the antiquated gladiator federation version of Hulk Hogan.
The plot thickens after the Roman mob, not to mention Caesar, discover who the masked, ready-to-rumble gladiator guy is standing amid the arena throngs.
Why, it's the vengeful Maximus. Imagine that.
Expect this. Generally, Gladiator is two-faced.
It's a slashing, trashy action picture with buckets of blood-letting, beheadings and even sword-fighting confrontations depicting transections of bodies.
It's also a New Age kind of trippy after-life thing implying that what we're watching might actually be a dreamy trance, and that even Romans experienced mind-jarring, virtual-reality flashes with fancy editing.
The action gives way to the artsy after-life jazz at wisely paced intervals. Thank you, Mr. Scott. All is forgiven for G.I. Jane.
Scott understands. Gladiator is, after all, an historical fightfest spectacle in the great tradition of Spartacus and Hercules Against Rome.
This is also the new millennium. So Gladiator might be the first spectacle to use extensive computer-generated re-creations of such historical sites as the Colosseum and the Rome skyline circa 40 AD (After DeMille). The computer fanciness gives some of the sequences a groovy, Da Vinci, paint-by-numbers feel, which may or may not be a bad thing.
On the emoting front, Crowe seems to get what's required. Forget his Oscar-nominated character study impression from The Insider.
In Gladiator, he keeps it simple. He looks smart, brutish and keeps the snarling and the melodramatic exaggerations to a minimum. He also wears a breastplate and swings a sword in a warrior-worthy, Kirk Douglas kind of way, although he's never topless.
Joaquin Phoenix is something else as Commodus Caesar, the evil, never-been-loved son of Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris).
Granted, Commodus is nasty. He kills his Caesar father, wants to sleep with his sister (Connie Nielsen) and perms his hair. But talk about cheese! Please.
In case we miss his villainy by deed, Phoenix grunts, growls and goes red-eyed. He's either the dastardly one or incredibly constipated.
And then there's Oliver Reed, who plays the gladiator owner with a heart of gold.
Reed died during the filming. The good news is that his okay co-starring bits, and some of Gladiator, wouldn't have killed him, if he hadn't.
(This film is rated AA)