Yes, Gladiator takes us firmly into my-name-is-Inigo-Montoya territory, with few real surprises along the way. Nonetheless, this is a sterling Y2K example of what Hollywood used to be good at -- sheer, $100-million spectacle, delivered with enough style and conviction to please the middlebrow viewers as well as the mob. (Highbrows, I'm afraid, will have to look elsewhere.)

The story is only loosely based on historical fact. In this alternate Roman history, Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris), who is fretting over the inevitable decline of his empire, plans to name the talented Roman general Maximus (Crowe) as his successor, bypassing his own son, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), who he knows is bad news. Thus, poor Commodus arrives on the scene as a marginally sympathetic character with some major Oedipal issues. Indeed, Commodus kills the old man before his decision to dis the youngster can be made known, ensuring his own succession to the throne. He orders the execution of Maximus, sending thugs to murder his wife and child for good measure. That leaves the relentlessly detestable Commodus in charge of ancient Rome, free to make clumsy passes at his beautiful and intelligent sibling Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) and indoctrinate her son (Spencer Treat Clark) in the Way of the Fussy Despot when she's not in the room.

I found this business pretty hard to take; even when the sneering Commodus began putting some impressively skeevy moves on his sister, I kept thinking that somewhere out there in the Roman countryside, Russell Crowe just had to be kicking some ass, and I was missing it. In all, Commodus is just too much, and too predictably oily, to hold much interest -- the bits of superficial political business presided over by Senator Gracchus (the terrific Derek Jacobi) were more to my liking as far as intrigue goes.

On the other side of the Empire, Maximus escapes his death sentence only to be captured by slave traders who auction him off to Proximo (Oliver Reed), an embittered ex-gladiator who makes his living on blood-and-guts spectacle. When Maximus learns that Commodus has ordered a long series of games in the Roman Colosseum -- and that talented gladiators are often brought before the emperor himself -- he commits himself to fighting his way into Commodus' presence once more.

As gladiatorial combat becomes Maximus's raison d'etre, the film shifts into sound-and-fury mode. The centerpiece sequence has Maximus and his fellow slave warriors being led into the huge Colosseum, a bleachered battleground where they may or may not meet their doom. The lower tiers of the Colosseum were built as a standard movie set; the remainder is filled in via computer graphics. What's important is that the camera places us with the gladiators inside the arena, spinning around to take in a 360-degree view of the place, which is packed with a bloodthirsty Roman mob screaming for our blood. All six channels of the movie's soundtrack fill with that otherworldly human din. In the demented grandeur of its imagined world, Gladiator is easily the most fearsome big-budget spectacle since James Cameron sunk the Titanic.

Visually, the immediate precedent is last year's The Phantom Menace, which shared Gladiator's delight in conjuring massive environments nearly out of thin air. But I get a hunch that the real inspiration came from Titanic, whose loving airborne tours of the great ship's gleaming metal surfaces are clearly echoed (and one-upped) in this film's sweeping overhead perspectives and ferocious imaginings of horrible death. Meanwhile, the fiery battle that opens the film owes more than a small debt to the chaotic Normandy sequence from Saving Private Ryan, although it's perhaps one-tenth as effective.

If director Ridley Scott has become an image processor, recycling the best work of his peers as well his himself, he earned that right long ago with the one-two punch of Alien and Blade Runner, the two movies that, building on the formidable advances made by Star Wars, forever changed the way the movie industry thought about the future. With the happy exception of Thelma & Louise, a screenwriter's movie if ever there was one, the bulk of his output through the 80s and 90s can safely be described as competent -- good-looking narratives without much drive behind them. If Scott's best movies are profound (and I think they are), it's a right-place-right-time profundity that comes from his knack for selecting scripts that explore a particular cultural zeitgeist, whether it be fear of the military-industrial complex (Alien), an grab for humanity in the face of technology and decay (Blade Runner), or the rebellion against she-was-asking-for-it gender politics (Thelma & Louise).

I'm not suggesting that Gladiator is as resonant as any of those three films, although Scott clearly feels he has his finger on something. After one particularly savage battle sequence, the cheers and applause welled up from moviegoers at my screening in tandem with the deafening roar of the Colosseum crowd, a fascinating example of life imitating art. Scott anticipated this, and flirts with the idea that the bloodlust of AD 2000 media consumers may be comparable to that of decadent old Rome. (If he had violent movies in mind, he's just being cynical; give him credit and figure he was thinking of the Fox network's reality programming or even Jerry Springer, whose trade is real violence rather than the stylized representation of same.) Perhaps his bullshit detector went off before he went too far down that road; instead, he just floats the idea for our delectation and then gets on with the film's flesh-tearing, torso-separating business.

Gladiator is quite a violent film, but it's one that moves violence nearly into the realm of abstraction. If it's difficult to tell who is doing what to whom, that's the aesthetic point -- you see a shadow move quickly across the screen, then you see Russell Crowe turning to face the threat, with a determined look on his face, then you see an indistinct action in close-up (probably the swish of a sword), followed by a quick cut of bursting flesh, then another wider shot in which the victim spins and falls to the ground, with a computer-generated splash of blood as the chaser. You don't have to follow what's going on to feel the impact in your gut.

Given this paradoxically elegant visual style (think of a cross between the shower scene in Psycho and the kinetics of a Wong Kar-wai film, and you're almost there), the film's main liability is a narrative that just peters out. After teasing us with the promise of something resembling a coup, Gladiator resorts to the tried-and-true spectacle of two guys beating the crap out of one another, never a favorite of mine.

Given that gripe, this is still uncommonly rousing entertainment that works an audience without pandering. Gladiator runs 154 minutes, and I really wouldn't know what to cut. This thing could have been four hours long and I bet I would have licked it up anyway. More time to spend showing Maximus proving himself out in the boonies before making the move to Rome, more development of the relationships between the big M and the rest of the slaves (not just Juba, played by the charming Djimon Hounsou), more exploration of the cagey political situation in ancient Rome. Then again, the reach for significance may have been disastrous. Here's a flick that knows better than to push its luck.