👎

In Gladiator II, the belated follow-up to 2000’s acclaimed story of Maximus—a betrayed Roman general who suffered the murder of his family, was left for dead, sold into slavery, and rose through the gladiatorial ranks with the guidance of a shrewd mentor to exact revenge—we follow Hanno, a defeated soldier whose wife is killed as he is captured and sold into slavery, only for him to find redemption in the gladiatorial arena of the Colosseum under the tutelage of a cunning mentor. Hey! Wait a minute…?

Gladiator II is so conscious of the shadow cast by its progenitor that it replays the highlights of the first film during its opening credits, as if attempting to reassure the sceptical audience but actually only refreshing their memories of how good the first movie was. The echoes don’t stop there; they resound throughout the entire narrative, but in ways that feel petty and derivative, not fresh and expansive. This isn’t George Lucas’ misguided ideal of prequel poetry, this is “I fed a bot the entire script of Gladiator and asked it to come up with a sequel” telenovela writing.

Paul Mescal steps into the arena, but it’s immediately apparent that he lacks Russell Crowe’s magnetism or towering screen presence. His Hanno feels lightweight and while the story desperately tries to conjure the same emotional gravitas, it never convinces. Mescal is a fine actor, but he’s ill-suited to this kind of muscular material, especially when saddled with a script as Gladiator II‘s. Even the films primary (or secondary) antagonists, the twin emperors Emperor Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), merely serve to emphasise the lack of substance in proceedings. They’re not even a shadow of Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus and while they offer a kind of cliched evil, it’s only in a curiously pantomime dame kind of way. From top to bottom, there’s an absence of gravitas throughout the cast, leaving Denzel Washington free to stomp through scenes unopposed, chewing the scenery and terrible dialogue like a thespian Tyrannosaurus rex.

Gladiator II (stylised on-screen as GladIIator, although the only 2 that’s got any style is the two fingers this risible and regrettable sequel gestures towards the audience) takes the original’s classic formula—loss, revenge, redemption—and strips it for story beats, taking the bones of the story but leaving the meat behind, making for a very meagre broth indeed. In place of emotional power and depth of character, we get spectacle and contrivances. Even the Colosseum’s programming has had an upgrade in a desperate attempt to distract the audience from how flimsy everything else is although filling (and emptying within the space of a day) with terrible GCI shark-infested waters transforms it from historical epic to hysterical parody. It’s closer in credibility to A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum than to Gladiator, that’s for sure.

Attempting to wring dramatic flavour out of the “mystery” of Hanno’s parentage, the film bets heavily on us buying into the suspected but still problematic revelation that Maximus’ murdered son was merely one of his progenies and isn’t nearly as compelling as the film believes. The trailers gave it away anyway, and instead of adding depth to Hanno, it just leads to some hilariously abrupt character decisions. In the scene where Mescal finally, inevitably dons Maximus’ armour he looks like a kid wearing his dad’s clothes, a visual metaphor so metatextually on-the-nose for the movie it almost counts as breaking the fourth wall.

There is a moment where Denzel Washington’s late-in-the day power play threatens to deliver some actual intrigue and in a film that wears its blood and sand ambitions on its sleeve, it’s these House of Cards-style manoeuvres that hint at something more interesting. It’s as if Ridley Scott’s true interest was in a historical political thriller, but he knew no studio would finance it without the promise of gladiators and spectacle. Sequelising his previous hit feels like an elaborate Trojan horse—a trick Scott’s used before, just like when he leveraged Fox’s desperation for an Alien sequel to instead deliver meditations on the genetic origins of life and humanity’s search for God.

A downgrade across the board, from script to screen, effects to emotions, Gladiator II must have felt like a real slog for poor old Derek Jacobi and Connie Nielsen who were lumbered with giving a degree of credibility and continuity to this Scrubs Season 9 of sequels. I know Maximus believed that what we do in life echoes in eternity but even he couldn’t have foreseen how cravenly everything he did in Gladiator would be echoed so cravenly a mere 24 years later. Are we not entertained? We are not.