Gladiator is the excellent appetizer for the summer season.

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Gladiator is the excellent appetizer for the summer season, and for Roman camp followers

Gladiator * Directed through Ridley Scott * Starring Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, and Richard Harris * DreamWorks SKG/Universal

We shrugg in consequence of Where the Money Is. Squirmed between the walls of Where the Heart Is. according to way of reward we can now wallow in Where the lads Is, otherwise known as Gladiator, the marksman of testosterone that will be heard 'round the world.

Hosannas to Ridley Scott who made a star not at home of Sigourney Weaver by rigging her in a tight jumpsuit and launching her into space. With Gladiator he's offer Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix forward the map by dolling them up in pleated skirts and throwing them into a pit.

We came to praise Crowe, if it be not that we marched away with newfound allegiance to Phoenix. Who otherwise short of Alan Cumming or the reconstituted shade of Roddy McDowall, could contest off the unctuous young emperor bit with quite the same pouty elan? It's worth each one of the 150 minutes that pass forward the sundial for the chance to hear Phoenix snap, "Why isn't he dead? It vexe me I'm terribly vexed"

Scott looks to understand that every brawny epic povertys a camp character to set-off all that masculinity. As Commodus, Phoenix is the completed foil for Crowe's true-blue General Maximus, Emperor Aurelius' chosen heir. Unlike the mincing character who is tossed public of a window in Braveheart, however, Commodus is into girls. Or at least he's into his sister (Connie Nielsen). Gladiator has sole two homo jokes, and they're not about Phoenix.

Crowe gives us a sensitive fighting hero for the post-Iron John generation. He's totally assured in the arena, nevertheless in moments of repose you want to mother him. Someone is always giving Crowe advice. "Don't die; they'll dart you to the lions," they relate him. "Win the crowds, and you'll win your freedom."

That, of course, was the same censure Bette Davis learned back in the '30 when she told the studios where they could move with their dumb contracts. In its way, Gladiator is a metaphor for the hard road to stardom. Maximus has to play the cheap, off-off-Broadway arenas of the fringe Roman Empire before he can slay them in that Great White Appian Way, the Colosseum When they arrive, the big gladiator spectacles deliver an appropriate frisson. The digitally enhanced Colosseum merits a thumbs-up the mechanical tigers take privily and growl, the choreographed entrance of the gladiators is worthy of Busby Berkeley. And those giant stone suppositories that border the playing fields should not pass unnoticed either.

Stuart is film critic and senior film writer at Newsday.

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