— In titling its new series “Spartacus: Blood and Sand,” the Starz
Network cannot be accused of false advertising. There is blood, and
lots of it — buckets of it, waves of it, seas of digitally enhanced
candy-apple-red comic-book gore, spilling, spurting, hurtling across
and toward the screen as bodies are stabbed, slashed, sledgehammered
and variously dismembered.
There is sand too, but you don’t notice that so much.
From executive producers
who led a revolt against the Romans back in, oh, some years ago, plays
as a more serious, more salacious cousin to the pair’s whimsical
“Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” and “Xena: Warrior Princess.”
When I say “serious,” I mean that it is not a lot of
laughs, not that it engages any profound or complex issues. The
motivations here are all very basic — sex, power and money on the part
of the badder guys, and love and freedom on the part of the better.
You’ve seen this before — the decadence of the
Romans set against the humble life of lusty village folk who wish only
to be left alone to make more village folk, but who all the while must
defend themselves from this empire or that barbarian horde.
The series, which begins Friday night, might be
described as, in no particular order, a mix of “300,” “Mad Max: Beyond
Thunderdome,” “Fight Club,” “Caligula,” “Rome,” “Gladiator,” the 1960
Stanley Kubrick “Spartacus” and any number of boxing or
you’re-in-the-army-now pictures, with
half-naked and talking dirty, as the cherry on top. (This is premium
cable, people.) So obviously heady is this combination, so guaranteed
to enslave a certain sort of fanboy/fangirl that the network ordered a
second season before its 13-episode first had even begun. And, really,
If the show’s concerns do not rise far above the
level of pulp — and there is nothing wrong with that — it does what it
does with a sure hand. The computer-generated effects can look a little
fake, but looking a little fake is part of this particular aesthetic,
born of video games and comic-book panels, sort of the way that
synthesizers were preferable to pianos in ’80s pop. Similarly, the
fight scenes — which involve lots of slow motion, the better to show
the deforming impact of steel or flesh on flesh — should not be taken
as more “real” simply because they’re more brutal. They are comic-book
bouts set to heavy-metal guitar and loud thumping noises.
Lawless — who was, I suppose I should point out, the
Warrior Princess Xena — is not as well-employed here as she was on
“Battlestar Galactica,” but she vamps quite nicely as the ambitious
wife of the owner of a school for gladiators; it is as layered a
performance as you could possibly require. As her husband, Scottish
actor
“Mummy” movies) keeps the show grounded with a persuasive portrait of a
man engaged in a stressful daily business. Whitfield is very good as
Spartacus, handsome and buff and smart and beastly.
against a lovely digital sunrise, she packs him off to fight barbarians
with the loving commandment, “Kill them all.” (“For you,” he returns.)
Given that “Spartacus” does not stumble in what it
sets out to do, one’s objections to the show, if objections one has,
will be moral, or simple matters of taste, to the extent that those two
concerns can actually be separated. It is a little bloody for my taste,
personally.
Still, in between the rumbles in the arena and the
rumbles in the bedroom, it’s a fairly talky show, the dialogue seasoned
with word inversions that signify the classical world to the modern ear
— “What purpose requires it?” and such. So if you are here just to get
a look at Lawless’ breasts or Whitfield’s behind, or any number of
other breasts and behinds, you will have to be a little patient, but
your patience will be rewarded.
‘Spartacus: Blood and Sand’
Where: Starz and Encore
When:
Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)
—
(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
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