“So why do you need a personal trainer for? You wanna beat somebody up, get the girl, and live happily ever after? One of those deals?” That fourth wall-shattering, imperfectly written line really exists in Gladiators of Rome, and it aptly symbolizes the simplicity and indifference to internal logic that characterizes the rote zero-to-hero story of this movie that’s bereft of a single original idea. If only a lack of originality alone accounted for its flaws, and not also a lack of care for detail.
It’s the age of Rome, and the renowned warrior Chirone runs an academy for training talented gladiators to fight for sport. Unfortunately his adopted son Timo, who Chirone saved from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii years before in AD 79, is a bum. He’s not talented, not courageous, not particularly strong, and completely unmotivated to apply himself to anything. Nothing pushes Timo to really try: not even getting chastised by Chirone or getting humiliated by the oafish Cassio, the academy’s top gladiator and nephew of the Emperor.
What does motivate Timo is the return of – surprise! – a girl in his life, when Chirone’s daughter Lucilla comes home after years of studying in Greece. Timo was raised with Lucilla when they were children and he pines for her but she’s been set up for marriage with the accomplished Cassio. With prodding from two of his dim-witted friends, Timo compensates for his inadequacy by taking what can only be called a magic potion in order to show up Cassio in a match, but Timo’s cheating is revealed during the fight and he’s thrown out on the street in disgrace. After some meandering Timo makes his way to the doorstep of Diana, an elite trainer who perfectly imitates the Strong Female Character™ stereotype as she makes a deal to train Timo as an ideal gladiator while knocking the hapless man around. While Timo goes through Diana’s training from hell, Cassio schemes to simultaneously win over Lucilla and turn her against Timo, while also seeking his own performance-enhancing drug for an added edge. Will he succeed, or will Timo finally learn discipline and commitment and prove himself with genuine effort? No prizes for guessing correctly.
On paper, Gladiators of Rome is a production that looks good. This is a movie from the successful Italian animation house Rainbow (Winx Club, Huntik) that, with its $45 million budget, qualifies as a bonafide big budget movie by that nation’s standards. It’s a film that director, producer and studio founder Iginio Straffi once called a “top-quality product” and cited as evidence for the truism that “Top quality animation is not the exclusive property of Pixar and Dreamworks and Fox,” which makes it all the more distressing that the movie is such a mess beyond the veneer of the acceptable and often cartoonishly expressive CG animation. The movie is crammed with scripted and visual gags that reference pop culture and modernity. Timo is given a labeled shirt to wear during training. There is talk of “merchandising” on fame and gladiators being called “rock stars.” The Roman Emperor himself spurns delicacies of the time in favor of consuming fried chicken. Cassio gloats about the “guns” that are his muscles. Michael J. Wilson’s script includes Timo inexplicably singing “If You’re Happy And You Know It, Clap Your Hands” during a jog at the academy. The possibility of a bowdlerized English dub can be ruled out, since these elements persist in subtitles and in the French language audio track included on the DVD provided for this review.
All that only begins to cover it. The film also wastes time on the hijinks of a mischievous rabbit in addition to a small group of, I kid you not, so-called baby gladiators that serve no purpose aside from messing around and fetching Cassio’s drug. Speaking of which, the presence of fantastical potions is treated like it’s all quite normal and treated in a way indistinguishable from illegal steroids in today’s context. The apothecary’s laboratory is inhabited by no small amount of machinery that flat out doesn’t belong. Gladiators of Rome isn’t set in Rome, it’s a contemporary cliched sports movie in the trappings of Rome with a hodgepodge list of other things thrown in.
Meanwhile, the characters and the plotting are no refuge. Lucilla is the prize waiting to be won by the men, nothing more, and all it takes is winning the showdown at the end for all past transgressions and misunderstandings to be forgiven. Diana’s mentoring of Timo treads thoroughly familiar ground, and she seems to scold and quip more than she teaches. One might ask why Lucilla and Timo aren’t like brother and sister if they were raised together as kids, and one would be kept wondering at the answer for a very long time. Why does Cassio feel any need to cheat when both he and others consider himself the best fighter around? For that matter, why would Cassio care about alienating Lucilla from Timo when his marriage was ordained and seemingly inevitable? No matter: jocks are jerks and they must be defeated.
It would be one thing if some of these issues and inconsistencies and oddities came up here and there in a film, but here they are so numerous and so unrelentingly prevalent that they become simply impossible to overlook. There are some works that do wonders for subverting the cliche that a “family movie” is just marketing code for a simplistic children’s movie. Then there works like Gladiators of Rome that turn out to be aggressively dumb and disrespectful of everyone’s time. Viewers young and old alike deserve a lot better than this.
