Thumbs down. Literally.
Given how we are now in a reality where 'Gladiator II' is on the horizon with a Kildare native bang smack in the middle of the arena with Denzel Washington cheering him on, the likelihood of 'Those About To Die' winning anyone over is slim to none.
For one, the biggest name in the cast - Anthony Hopkins, as Emperor Vespasian - has a ceremonial role at best, and when he's on screen, he's hamming it up and roaring his lines like he's trying to shout across the arena when people are three feet in front of him. Moreover, the rest of the cast is decidedly out of place. Iwan Rheon, best known to audiences for his turn as sadist Ramsey Snow in 'Game of Thrones', plays a wheeler-dealer bookmaker who has plans for upward mobility in Rome but, you're never quite able to shake the feeling that it involves torturing random people instead.
Meanwhile, Tom Hughes and Jojo Macari play Titus and Domitian, the sons of the Emperor who are busy knifing one another in the back while trying to win their father's favour, but most of it involves one of them having an affair with a Jewish princess played by Lara Wolf, while the other's a degenerate gambler. As if that wasn't enough, there's a basic retread of 'Gladiator', with Moe Hashim's character Kwame essentially playing the same role as Russell Crowe, as a noble warrior who seeks to redeem himself in the ring. This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, as the 1958 paperback hit that the series takes its name from was also a key inspiration for 'Gladiator' and Ridley Scott.
If it wasn't clear already, 'Those About To Die' is trying to cover every possible story that one could in a Roman setting. There's sex, violence, political intrigue, history, redemption, revenge, yet how is it so boring and dull? For one, all of the above have been done before and far, far better. HBO's 'Rome' is by far the best TV series set in this time and place since BBC's much lauded 'I, Claudius', yet its aloofness at times made it inaccessible to audiences. For something broader in appeal and a little sexy and silly, you had Starz' 'Spartacus', from 'Buffy' scribe Steven S. DeKnight and Sam Raimi. Even leaving TV series aside, the sword-and-sandal saga has been overserved in cinema for decades.
Directing several of the episodes is Roland Emmerich, whose work includes has ranged in quality wildly over the years from memorably OK to just downright terrible. 'Those About To Die' is somewhere towards the latter, but the blame doesn't necessarily fall all on his shoulders. For one, the CGI is quite poor - even on a small screen - and adds little flavour to proceedings. It doesn't help that the costumes and the set design looks deeply uninspired, or that the overbearing music is just as unoriginal. Robert Rodat's scripts have little in the way of style or finesse, and much of the delivery from the cast feels like it's been amped up to try and give them some kind of weight.
The result is everything feels tedious, and by the third or fourth episode, just about all interest has been wrung out of it.