May 5, 2000 | There hasn’t been a full-blown sword-and-sandal spectacle like Gladiator in nearly four decades. So long, in fact, that most moviegoers below a certain age might hear the title and only dimly recall a classic comic bit in Airplane! – “Johnny, do you like to watch gladiator movies?” – or TV reruns of Ben Hur and Spartacus. To his considerable credit, director Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner) manages to silence the snickers and brush away the cobwebs by breathing fresh life into the long-dormant genre, combining elaborate showmanship with an urgent sense of purpose in an aggressively larger-than-life epic.

To be sure, it helps a lot that Scott has access to enough computer-generated imagery and other high-tech legerdemain to make whole swathes of Gladiator more massively scaled and intricately detailed than anything William Wyler or Stanley Kubrick -- or even D.W. Griffith – ever managed to conjure up. But it helps even more that Scott hasn’t neglected the human factor. In Russell Crowe, the astonishingly chameleon-like actor last seen as a middle-aged, out-of-shape whistleblower in The Insider, Scott has found a singularly unlikely but thoroughly credible and compelling leading man to assume the mantle of hero in his new-fangled take on old-fashioned movie conventions.

Crowe plays Maximus, a manly man’s man who’s introduced as a general in the army of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (a near-ghostly Richard Harris) circa 180 A.D. Maximus must lead the charge against invading barbarian hordes during a key battle at a far-flung corner of the Roman Empire. And as soon as he growls his call to arms – “At my command, unleash hell!” – you know those hordes are in for a hard time. Sure enough, once the clash commences, Gladiator erupts into a furious montage of swinging swords, flaming arrows, hacked limbs and – goodness gracious! – great balls of fire. It’s so cold, steam issues from the warm blood that spurts like geysers. And it’s so fast – disorientingly fast, actually – that you can’t help suspecting that Scott did some serious hacking of his own, avoiding an NC-17 rating for violence by tempering the really rough stuff with quick cuts and alternative angles.

Aurelius is greatly pleased, and offers to make Maximus – whom he treats as the son he never had – his designated heir to the Roman emperorship. This greatly displeases Commodus (Joaquim Phoenix), the son Aurelius actually did have. Commodus responds to being passed over by suffocating his dad and ordering his soldiers to whack Maximus. Naturally, the soldiers are no match for the general, who unleashes a little more hell before making his escape to his farm in Spain. Unfortunately, Maximus doesn’t get home before Commodus’ men murder his wife and son. Bereaved and wounded, he is weak enough to be captured by slave traders who sell him to Proximo (Oliver Reed), a former gladiator who, after winning his freedom, established a business to ready other poor saps for recreational mortal combat.

Reed, that grand grizzly bear who mastered the fine art of overstated underplaying, died during the filming of Gladiator, reportedly after a long day of binge drinking and hell unleashing on location in Malta. The dark irony is, the movie would have been a terrific comeback vehicle for the late actor. Reed exuberantly plays Proximo as a hard-bitten blowhard with a sentimental steak, a frankly amoral merchant who’s quick to market lesser mortals as flesh-and-blood props for fatal spectacles, but even quicker to recognize and credit true talent when he sees it. As Maximus performs in what appears to be the farm league for gladiators, Proximo spots a star on the rise. And maybe, just maybe, Proximo, too, sees a son he never had.

Proximo encourages his hot prospect to bring a touch of style, a dollop of charisma, to the bloody business of being a gladiator. At first, however, Maximus is diffident: “I’m required to kill – so I’ll kill. That’s enough.” “That’s enough for the provinces,” Proximo counters, “but not for Rome.” And Rome is where Proximo wants to showcase Maximus as a sword-wielding superstar. Maximus remains unimpressed – until he realizes that, while hacking his way to acclaim in the Coliseum, he might get a chance for payback while the new emperor, Commodus, is a member of the audience.

At several points along the way to its unexpectedly affecting finale, Gladiator skirts perilously close to high camp and low comedy. Indeed, the line gets crossed with a vengeance late in the movie, when Commodus takes time away from incestuously longing for his beautiful sister, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), and haughtily appraises the captured Maximus. “The general who became a slave,” Commodus purrs. “The slave who became a gladiator. The gladiator who defied an emperor. Striking story …” Throughout most of Gladiator, Phoenix makes a suitably repulsive villain, adding a pungent dash of whiny and wounded self-rationalization to his chronic evil doings. In this particular scene, however, he sounds like he’s offering a plot synopsis for folks who tuned in late, or a concise sound bite for an Entertainment Tonight feature. Either way, he makes you giggle just when the movie should be gearing up for a deadly serious climax.

But never mind: Gladiator delivers the goods when it comes to grandiose spectacle, even when it’s a little too obvious that about 33,000 of the 35,000 Coliseum extras are computer-generated special effects. Ridley Scott freely borrows visual flourishes from sources as diverse as Fall of the Roman Empire and Triumph of the Will, and generates genuine suspense from a sketchily-developed subplot about behind-the-scenes political machinations. (Derek Jacobi, appearing as comfortable in a toga here as he did in the classic I, Claudius miniseries, has a nice bit as a senator who disapproves of bread-and-circus excess in the Coliseum.) And whenever things get too draggy, or threaten to become downright silly, Russell Crowe is always there to jolt the movie back to life and keep it on track.

Sustaining a masterful balance of authoritatively virile physicality and forebodingly implosive rage, Crowe plays Maximus as a down-to-earth natural leader of men who’d much rather be tilling fields than cleaving barbarians, but who lives only for revenge after everyone he loves is killed. You may go to see Gladiator for the best cheap thrills that money can buy. But you’ll walk away remembering nothing so vividly as the grateful smile on Crowe’s face as Maximus finally savors his just desserts.