US Edition
Those About to Die, review: Anthony Hopkins leads a veritable orgy of blood, CGI... and orgies
Can’t wait for Gladiator 2? Get stuck into Roland Emmerich’s tale of audacious slaves, warring emperors and orgiastic commoners in AD 79
In 1979 Bob Guccione, the producer of Caligula but also the publisher of Penthouse, ordered lashings of porn to be dropped into the movie while John Gielgud was looking the other way. Anthony Hopkins may or may not have consulted such entrails before choosing to ennoble Those About to Die (Amazon Prime) with his august presence. His ancient emperor Vespasian presides with much solemnity over a Rome that humps and thrusts in an eternal softcore frotfest.
Orgiastic grunts and gropes, men-only pile-ins, random lesbian kit-offs: a tick-list of every-which-way sexpottery suggests the intimacy coordinators were the busiest bees on the 230-day shoot – though the dignity of nude extras, not to mention some female leads, seems not to have been a priority.
The progenitor of all this swordplay is co-director Roland Emmerich, who gave us such Brobdingnagian understatements as Independence Day and Godzilla. This is them, drawn from Daniel P Mannix’s 1958 history of Roman circuses, and stretched on the rack to 10 hours. If it’s not sex it’s death. Limbs are never not being lopped, tongues severed, throats sliced. One head is sheared off by a massive computerised crocodile. The showrunner, Robert Rodat, seems just as comfortable around a whopping body count, having scripted Saving Private Ryan.
This being Rome, there’s no end of plot. Hustling ex-slave Tenax (Iwan Rheon) plots to win big in the chariot races. Numidian matriarch Cala (Sara Martins) plots to free her three children. Domitian (Jojo Macari), serpentine spare to the imperial heir, plots to thwart his lunky big bro Titus (Tom Hughes). And so on, and on.
Subtle? Never. Absurd? Always. Fun? Not quite enough. Macari gets into the spirit, unleashing his berserk inner John Hurt to act as if guy-ropes tweak every facial muscle. Others in the vast Euro-cast make way less sense emoting in English-as-a-foreign-language. Charioteering superstar Scorpus (Dimitri Leonidas) aids comprehension by usefully referring to himself in the third person.
Those inclined to grouch about ethnically inaccurate casting can relax. In Emmerich’s imperial melting pot, light filters render everyone a slick burnished bronze. A big shout-out to the designers for reimagining a Rome that throbs with colour and pomp. To rebuild and repopulate the vast Circus Maximus and the Colosseum, they have summoned those ever-helpful gods of CGI, Digitalis and Pixelus. As for myriad brothel scenes, presided over by the ever-popular deity Pneumatica, with lavish accuracy they recreate history’s peak era of excess, AD 1979.
Those About to Die is on Amazon Prime Video from Friday 19 July