I'd like to correct an error made by a previous reviewer, who tells us, "I was unable to keep a straight face most of the time especially with Alan Steel...playing a very athletic Commodus rather than the mad wimp which history tells us he was!"
In fact, the historian Herodian tells us that Commodus "was the handsomest man of his time, both in beauty of features and in physical development...inferior to no man in skill and in marksmanship." It is Hollywood, not history, that insists on making Roman emperors into effete wimps. For historical accuracy, Russell Crowe would have been better cast to play Commodus than wimpy Joaquin Phoenix. But Hollywood will insist on making the worldly villain "less manly" than the straight-arrow hero.
Another reviewer here berates the performance of Dan Vadis as the hero in this movie, saying he "resembles a happy monkey half the time, smiling inappropriately or staring blankly..." But remember that Vadis is playing a slap-happy Christian, and doesn't that description fit a lot of the Christians you know?
Alan Steel's muscular and brutish portrayal of Commodus is probably the cinema's most accurate, even though this movie, no less than "Gladiator" and "Fall of the Roman Empire," pulls its punches when it comes to Commodus. The truly shocking, hair-raising accounts of his reign (found in Dio Cassius, Herodian, and the Historia Augusta) go far beyond anything Hollywood or Cinecitta have ever dared to put on the screen!