Gladiator: A-

Charming, fun, bloody. Those three words describe Gladiator, sure, but the funny thing is they only describe the first few minutes. Those minutes in which the Roman general Maximus (Russell Crowe) orders his men to destroy a barbarian stronghold for Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris). The battle that ensues is one of decadent combat - flame and physicality...basically a delicious explosion of everything that director Ridley Scott finds amusing in battle put together in only a few minutes of screentime. Don't be mistaken into thinking there is only blood here. No, instead Scott has managed to find poetry in the destruction and so sends the entire production on an upward-spiraling bent of near religous proportions. There isn't all rainbows and bloodbaths in Roman paradise however.

You see, the Emperor loves Maximus as his own son much more than he does his actual son, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) and so attempts to entrust upon the general the power to return Rome to a Republic (as it was originally concieved) by making this lowly warrior the next Caesar. Commodus doesn't take the news well and in a fit of glorious unchained id strangles his father as he embraces him. That only starts Commodus on the war path. After he has ascended to the throne of Rome he kills everyone that Maximus ever loved and thinks he has done the same to Maximus himself. Instead, Maximus had escaped and been sold into slavery and become a gladiator at the hands of Proximo (Oliver Reed). The new Emperor, hungry for blood, reinstates the gladiator games and so Proximo takes his legion of slaves to Rome...where "the Spaniard" (aka Maximus) quickly becomes the audiences favorite winner and so gains a battle with the Emperor himself in a rose-strewn arena that concludes the film's final act.

Ridley Scott has staged this "swords-and-sandals" epic with wonderful action and great fun but has also managed to elicit something from this film that few of his others have: an emotional center. Maximus, as the axis on which everything else turns, has a ripe, tragic motivation and the other characters benefit well from this. Put up against such a monolith of purity and righteousness the treacherous, broken Commodus gains dimension and the Senate for which Maximus is campaigning to save takes on the metaphor of Democracy itself.

Where the first half relied on stunning virtues made crystal clear in Maximus (to which Russell Crowe should be thankful, this is a role of a lifetime), the second is more rough: a psychosexual melodrama in which Commodus plays a delightfully sickening central role. Russell Crowe, his formerly puffy visage (in Michael Mann's The Insider) and body have been transformed into a handsomely muscular cut and his expressive performance gives light to his molten contempt. His presence on screen deserves only one word: glorious. This is the announcement of an up-til-now unknown coming out as both a personality and as a phenomenol actor.

Joaquin Phoenix conjures a powerful performance by creating a perverse air as a boy trapped in a man's body. He is an unchained id with a damaged conscience, to blinded by his own "rationale" to think outside of his tiny box of self-pity and world-hating. Connie Nielsen, who plays his sister (for who he has a creepy attraction) Lucilla, likewise nails her part; yet I wish the movie hadn't hinged so much on Lucilla's underdrawn character. And even those minor characters in the film are given rich presence by their performers.

Pulsing with strains of anything that has ever entertained Scott (e.g. fatherhood, brotherhood, masculinity, honor, power, love) and upheld by characters given snarling, pounding, intelligent voices by David Franzoni's fabulous script this is a movie that has everything you could ever want. It is a feast for the mind, eyes, and heart.