Crowe is great and Phoenix is pretty darn good too (although extremely creepy with his sister). The one vs. one fight with the tigers playing a role in the fight is one of my favorite sword type battles in any movie. Still one of the better epics out there.
You can really tell this is a Nolan film, the similarities in dialogue with Inception were pretty uncanny. Which leads to my new theory about Inception's exposition issues. Since he started writing the script back then, the film-school dialogue simply carried over to Inception's otherwise polished & professional quality.
Oh, and I take it everyone noticed the batman logo.