Why this film is rated somewhere in the mid 6's is beyond me. Roger Ebert had it right when he put it in the top ten of the year 2000. Finely crafted, technically perfect, it achieves everything it sets out to achieve. I fear that people who weren't in its target audience went to see it and were taken aback. Intense, creepy, and good despite Jennifer Lopez- quite a testament to any movie's quality.
Reviews
3 Reviews
Face/Off
(1997)
only criticism anyone can level is superficial
19 March 2001
That Face/Off achieves what it does with the plot it has only makes its achievement all the more impressive. The plot is certifiably ridiculous. Obviously the two leads do an amazing job of becoming each other- kudos to two actors who haven't done a movie this good since (as of March 2001). Joan Allen and Gina Gershon are superb. I got more emotionally involved in Face/Off to a degree I had never been before with any action movie- or any genre for that matter. John Woo has made his best movie, and while Hard Boiled and The Killer come close, the rest of his Asian corpus of work is no comparison.
Gladiator
(2000)
Top 250? Not even top 1000, sorry
4 August 2000
How has Ridley Scott pulled the veil over everyone's eyes? The camera-work in the first battle scene is disorienting and intentionally blurry to avoid showing anything in detail. The dialogue, from start to finish, is unrealistic- both on a human level and a Roman level. If you want to incorporate historical figures into a fictionalized account, treat them as historical figures, not perversions of historical figures with the same names. Marcus Aurelius was not a 2000 year-too-early Thomas Jefferson. Whatever Hellenistic notions of democracy the Greeks held to, the Romans repudiated until the disintegration of their empire. I laughed awkwardly (to mask my offense and disbelief) when Aurelius lets his daughter know what an impressive "Caesar she would have made had she been born a man." What utter nonsense! Furthermore, the character of Commodus is not so much miscast as it is botched in the person of Joaquin Phoenix. Russell Crowe acquits himself nicely in his performance as Maximus, but is his story of revenge really that sympathetic? The computer generated Rome is impressive, but not even on a par with the Rome of Julie Taymor's recent "Titus." And what is this odd, recurring cornball shot of Maximus parallel to the ground as the grass moves under him? The production value of Gladiator is high (at times), but someone should've hired a proofreader and BS detector.
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