There were a lot of films in the 1990s and 2000s where heroic characters yelled about freedom and goosed the spirits of their brethren who were meant to rise up and overthrow the tyranny. Two of them, Braveheart and Gladiator, won the Academy Award for best picture. Braveheart never got a sequel – perhaps the eventual stench of Mel Gibson was just too strong, or perhaps those involved chose fidelity to history – but now Gladiator gets one of the most emblematic trends of the first quarter of the 21st century, the delayed sequel, with all its implausible connective tissue and “rousing” speeches that feel like so much perfunctory filler a quarter of a century later.
As with any Ridley Scott film, Gladiator II walks and talks like an epic, full of convincing digital landscapes, movie stars who wear their robes and armour well, and action scenes that attempt to epitomise the dramatic stakes faced by the characters, even if you’ve forgotten about them moments after they’ve concluded. This does not make Gladiator II a terrible film, it just makes it a predictable one, an uninspired one, an uninspiring one. That Scott is closer to 90 than 80, and is still making movies of this scale, is and shall remain impressive, but the scale itself has ceased to impress us. Gladiator II is the kind of film that makes you wonder what next horizon we’ll need to surpass in order to be wowed by this sort of spectacle again.
The aforementioned connective tissue is the son of Maximus, Russell Crowe’s iconic character from the original, though he’s not revealed as such straight away. We meet him as Hanno (Paul Mescal), a commander taken captive after the last city in his region falls to the invading Roman army in the second century A.D. That army is led by General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), who we know is morally upright because of the miserable look on his face after he’s sacked the city. One of the casualties of this battle is Hanno’s wife (Yuval Gonen), an archer felled by an arrow from a counterpart on the other side. For this, the enslaved Hanno wants Acacius’ head.
Thus begins a familiar structure in which Hanno – soon to be revealed as Lucius, son of Maximus and Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla, returning from the original – is sent into various arenas against formidable foes, to a likely death that he escapes with his cunning and keen fighting skills. There he catches the eye of Macrinus (Denzel Washington), an arms trader and upcoming political aspirant, who purchases the gladiator and plans to showcase him for Rome’s twin emperors, Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), the effete brothers who give Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus a run for his money in terms of relishing cruelty. Lucilla will reveal herself to her son, who’s still angry after she sent him away as a child to save his life, and Macrinus will stir up the pot to bend Rome toward his own ends. Meanwhile, Lucius steadily grows in mythic status to rival his father’s.
It’s possible for Gladiator II to be almost exactly what you would expect it to be, even if your expectations were optimistic, while still functioning as a considerable disappointment. Any optimism was based on naïve hopes of what a movie like this could theoretically be, not what history shows us it always is. Scott’s film is undone by a number of small weaknesses rather than any real qualms about the overall contours of its story, though some considerable license with history is at play in that as well, some of it easier to stomach than others.
Denzel Washington is one of these small weaknesses. Paradoxically, he is both one of the film’s most interesting aspects and one its most glaring faults. Any time he opens his mouth, his mere charisma and purposefully anachronistic speech patterns awaken us from whatever mediocrity-inspired slumber in which we may have found ourselves. But as much as he’s a relief from the generic dialogue and traditional interpretations of the other players, he also makes us take notice for the wrong reasons. Whatever modern interpretation you want to take from the film’s themes – and there are certainly plenty who would find resonance in this film’s release in a U.S. presidential election year – is underpinned by Macrinus and his machinations. However, we also wonder what a grinning, modern-day Denzel Washington is doing in ancient Rome.
The absolute technical mastery of the fight sequences – both the battles and those in the Colosseum – were an essential component for Gladiator winning best picture, as the themes alone would not have gotten it there. The similar scenes here are notable for their contrasts, perhaps because Scott seems to be trying so hard to give us something textually different while viscerally similar.
It isn’t a success. The two main scenes against non-human combatants involve these sort of man-sized, hairless monkeys fed with a dose of the rage virus from 28 Days Later, who are such a fiendish blur of gnashing teeth that they never look remotely real, and the time the Colosseum is flooded and populated with sharks to recreate a sea battle for the Roman audience. This last is so preposterous that I can’t even bring myself to look up whether anything like that really happened, because it works much better as an illustration of Scott’s implied question of his audience: “Are you not entertained?” Sorry to say it Ridley, but not usually in Gladiator II.
Mescal undoubtedly makes for a smouldering gladiator, which is perhaps all the role really requires, even though Crowe did win an acting Oscar for the first film. (If they’d known he was going to be nominated for A Beautiful Mind the next year, they might have saved the statue to give to him then.) But anyone who has followed Mescal’s career, with its preference for critically acclaimed independent cinema, has to feel a little sorry to see him reduced to just the face of Scott’s latest attempt to bring us a soulless big-scale entertainment.
Jadedness is in the eye of the beholder. It’s disingenuous to suggest that some movies are absolutely better than others at conjuring certain emotions or achieving certain dramatic goals, without considering the role viewer experience plays in the equation. If you’ve never seen a movie where people yell about freedom and courage to legions of oppressed citizens, the first one you see might stir your soul. However, it’s hard to imagine even the most green viewers having such a reaction to the piffle that fills the margins of a spectacle like Gladiator II, which has long since ceased to entertain us.
Gladiator II is currently playing in cinemas.