10 Movies You Constantly Have To Defend Hating
6. Gladiator
Ridley Scott's 2000 sword-and-sandal epic Gladiator has been widely credited with reviving the historical epic genre, and managed to bag five Academy Awards - including Best Picture. God knows why.
Fans will insist that Gladiator is an intense, complex rollercoaster full of impressive battles and tragic characters, but that couldn't be further from the truth. After a relatively engaging opening, the film slows down to a crawl and devolves into a suffocatingly dull, entirely predictable revenge flick. Despite its excellent costume work and production design, Gladiator gets bogged down in political intrigue that largely falls flat, and its characters feel one-note and underdeveloped.
The one thing that could have redeemed Gladiator - its many action scenes - are sadly its biggest failing. Ridley Scott can usually be trusted to deliver on even the worst scripts, but the gladiatorial combat in this gladiatorial combat film is so choppily edited in baffling extreme close-up that all sense of impact is lost. It could be that this is an attempt to convey the intensity and desperation that would undoubtedly be present in such arenas, but to do so at the expense of a watchable scene is unwise at best.
Russell Crowe can deliver a threatening one-liner with the best of them, but a few badass catchphrases can't save this overlong tosh.