Gladiator.

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

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

We shrugged through Where the Money Is. Squirmed through Where the Heart Is. By way of reward we can now wallow in Where the Boys Is, otherwise known as Gladiator, the shot of testosterone that will be heard 'round the world.

Hosannas to Ridley Scott, who made a star out of Sigourney Weaver by rigging her in a tight jumpsuit and launching her into space. With Gladiator he's put Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix on the map by dolling them up in pleated skirts and throwing them into a pit.

We came to praise Crowe, but we marched away with newfound allegiance to Phoenix. Who else, short of Alan Cumming or the reconstituted ghost of Roddy McDowall, could pull off the unctuous young emperor bit with quite the same pouty elan? It's worth every one of the 150 minutes that pass on the sundial for the chance to hear Phoenix snap, "Why isn't he dead? It vexes me. I'm terribly vexed."

Scott seems to understand that every brawny epic needs a camp character to offset all that masculinity. As Commodus, Phoenix is the perfect foil for Crowe's true-blue General Maximus, Emperor Aurelius' chosen heir. Unlike the mincing character who is tossed out of a window in Braveheart, however, Commodus is into girls. Or at least he's into his sister (Connie Nielsen). Gladiator has only 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, but in moments of repose you want to mother him. Someone is always giving Crowe advice. "Don't die; they'll throw you to the lions," they tell him. "Win the crowds, and you'll win your freedom."

That, of course, was the same lesson Bette Davis learned back in the '30s when she told the studios where they could go 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 scenes deliver an appropriate frisson. The digitally enhanced Colosseum merits a thumbs-up, the mechanical tigers lurch 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.