At last girlies, something burly

It's good to be reminded every now and then that there is such a thing as All Man. Yes, that's All Man, not two parts man and one part bloke, chap or fellow. You won't find him in a Bond film - in fact, you won't usually find him in a film at all. His job is not jokes or wearing eyeliner. His job is not to have tidy hair or persuasive dialogue. He is not there to outwit, to dupe, to seduce, to escape, to chuckle, to charm, to grin, to frolic or to have a shower. He is there to win, not with cunning nor well-placed pals - with nothing on his side but the love of God and the muscles of the very devil.

Yes, obviously I'm talking about Gladiator. Of course I'm talking about Russell Crowe. And I'm talking from the standpoint of one who had precisely no interest in seeing an epic film about a curiously uninteresting period of Roman history where all they did was wrangle, kill one another and belch. I hate long films, I don't think much of random nastiness to tigers and I used to weep into my French homework at the sight of Elizabeth Taylor ruining my Sunday afternoons with her silly headgear and improbable breasts. I went to see it, against all odds and a fortnight too late, because every woman I've ever met is in love with this man. And they're right to be. No red-blooded anything could possibly not be.

Here was a film which would only work with a new kind of hero, and here was a man who could do it. Not with a human face and a patch behind his ears which the right kind of girl could scratch to hear him purr, but with the kind of manliness that whole nations wouldn't come close to if they pooled their testosterone and did a dance of rage.

How exactly does he do it? It doesn't hurt to open a film with 5,000 burly men cheering you and doing what you say, even if that includes marching into a line of giants in bearskins. His strong words, softly spoken, didn't do him any harm either (Rus-sell, you couldn't be righter. What we do in life does echo in eternity). Who could deny his low growl of majesty? Who could watch him stride barearmed through the snow, with a small (but probably very sore) cut, unheeded, across his nose, and fail to want him? And here's the coup de théâtre - in this film, I want doesn't get. Not even the chick with the fundamentally good heart, the quivering vulnerability and the pretty neck can have him this time.

Here's definitive proof that it's not just women whose appeal rockets with a bit of unswerving unavailability. More than that, though, here's a lovely, coppery death knell for the days of the baby-faced hero. In tandem with the rise of Leonardo DiCaprio came the obligatory, half-scientific research into why we like him. Women respond to men with feminine faces because they trust them to stick around, the theory goes. The trouble with it is, what on earth would you want with a film star who looks as though he might stick around? Celluloid, like any fantasy medium, is about the quick fix, not the long term. Early-teen audiences may not have grasped this yet, and may still hold out for the girlish superhero. But we've got more pocket money than them, and the return of the All Man is, commercially, culturally, spiritually, long overdue.

This isn't to say that all current heroes are baby-faced. Some of them are real men - Christian Slater, Bruce Willis, John Malkovich (until recently, when he turned, quite charmingly, into all joke). But a real man isn't the same. Where a real man needs to want women very badly indeed, an All Man needs to want just the one. Forever and a day, and then some more when he hits his echoey but otherwise pleasant eternity. He can be happily married, then he can be desolately bereaved, but he can't change his mind halfway through and decide that another model will do for the time being.

A real man needs to think about things, maybe be a bit philosophical on the side, but an All Man can't think at all - he's on the side of the thinkers, but his actions come from within, from the hunk of burning manliness which bypasses reason and reaches the same point twice as fast. A real man needs muscles, but an All Man needs to have acquired them in fields and on battlefields, in pursuit of the simple pleasures of a simple soul, without sophistry or showmanship or playfulness. A real man knows how to saddle up a horse, but an All Man's horse puts its own saddle on, against all the odds of only having hooves, just for the love of him. A real man needs to understand the word on the streets, but an All Man needs to be able to see into another chap's soul just by looking at the sweat on his brow. A real man can ultimately triumph; an All Man can't. He's fighting against the evil, the sorrow and the injustice of the human condition. He has to win, but he has to die.

All real men have had All Man moments; no, not just Kevin Cost-ner lugging Whitney about in The Bodyguard. Anyone with a bit of genuine-article stubble can pull it off for short periods. Only Russell Crowe, though, says it all about the new heroism. The wheel's come full circle, and nobody wants a word-smith any more, or a sensitive type, or a wily rogue. We all want a fireman rescuing a kitten, except, actually guys, can we get a bit primeval and have him fighting off some vicious, kitten-hating barbarians first? No, scratch that, can we have a whole school stuck up a tree, which is, like, on fire?