The sword-and-sandal films of Italy that ran from about the late 1950s to mid 1960s, are commonly known by the name given to them by the French film critics reviewing them. Peplum, or pepla if you're using the plural, a Latin term for a Greek article of clothing, it's nothing more than setting, but there's a condescension in the word. Pep-lum. You can feel the sneer beneath the words, saying it makes you almost want to spit the last syllable out. It's not like Italy was loath for acclaimed cinema at the time, this is the era of Fellini after all, but there's always something off about the peplum films. These grand failures reaching for a sliver of the reception of their big Hollywood counterparts.

Colossus Of Rhodes is one of these such peplum films, the first credited work of director Sergio Leone, and much like the titular wonder at its center, it is grand, huge, epic, and ultimately hollow. It's perhaps notable that Leone would become a master of pacing and time, because none of that skill appears here. The film drags like a robe laden with the water of the Mediterranean, each agonizing moment feeling as if it was stretched for eons. It doesn't help either that the cast does little to make the characters interesting, drawing from stock archetypes but with none of the charisma seen in Leone's later westerns. Rory Calhoun, our lead, is handsome but his acting skill seems to begin and end there.

Visually, the film is impressive, and there are attempts by Leone to capture a viewpoint of Ancient Rome by way of Hollywood artificiality, but none of it comes together in a way that works. It's like a child putting on their father's clothes and pretending to do their job, but knowing that at the end of the day, they're just a child and they will need to relinquish the fantasies to the adults. The film isn't even that bad, it's just nothing, a mediocrity that will leave the mind as soon as the credits start rolling, and would've been lost to the sands of the hourglass of cinema if it wasn't for the fact that its director would go onto much grander (and yet ironically smaller in scope) masterpieces in the years afterwards.