Twenty-four years later, Ridley Scott revisits one of his most beloved films, the sword-and-sandal epic Gladiator, though the sequel picks up a mere 16 years after the action of that film.
Gladiator II starts in north Africa, where Roman imperial daughter Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) sent her son, Lucius, to protect him from Rome’s corruption and chaos following the death of her brother, the emperor Commodus. Now grown, Lucius (Paul Mescal) is known as “Hanno”, he is married to a badass named Arishat (Yuval Gonen), and he’s determined to protect his adopted home from Rome’s invading forces. That doesn’t go well for him, as we need the movie to happen. Lucius ends up widowed and shipped to Rome to fight as a gladiator, just like his father before him.
In some ways, mostly visual and action-wise, Gladiator II taps into the thrills of Gladiator, with beautiful sets, sweeping cinematography (courtesy Gladiator’s cinematographer, John Mathieson), and soaring music (provided this time by Henry Gregson-Williams, but he certainly knows when to pull out samples of Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerard’s revered score). Gladiator II looks great, it sounds great, the arena battles are certainly entertaining, though the obligatory embiggening of a sequel does eventually lead to a feeling of familiarity and bloat. Gladiator II is actually a few minutes shorter than Gladiator’s theatrical cut, but it feels longer, probably because so much of it feels like a retread.
Much of the plot is recycled from the original film, in which a humbled Roman citizen must win the hearts of the people in the Coliseum while under the tyrannical thumb of a cruel and corrupt emperor. Here, there are TWO emperors, twins Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), a pair of obvious psychopaths who can’t even pretend to care about the people of Rome. A great deal of Gladiator II is dedicated to going on (and on) about Marcus Aurelius’s “dream of Rome” and how it’s well and truly dead and buried after Maximus’s death years before, and the worst thing that happens in the film is watching Paul Mescal’s performance temper into a bland retread of Russell Crowe’s Maximus.
This is NOT on Mescal, he does what is demanded by the script, it just sucks to see Hanno/Lucius morph into a figure that, like a lot of Gladiator II, feels recycled. In the first half of the film, Hanno is wild and unpredictable, his burning rage a tangible force that cuts through the space between screen and audience (the power of a true movie star!). There is a breathless thrill to his early fights, fueled by Mescal’s forceful performance. But the second half of the film demands he take up Maximus’s sword and fight for the dream of Rome (again), and Hanno loses that volatile edge as he morphs into Lucius and becomes a more typical hero figure that we’ve seen time and time again.
Gladiator II is at its best, though, when everyone is completely f-cking unhinged. Hanno is most interesting when all he cares about is doing however many state-sanctioned murders it takes to fight his wife’s killer; the more he cares about Rome, the less interesting he is. Similarly, Pedro Pascal, who plays Roman general Acacius, is most interesting when he’s telling the emperors to f-ck off. Yes, he’s good at depicting the weariness of a man who no longer believes in the cause he fights for, but he’s BEST when he’s telling everyone to get bent. Quinn and Hechinger have a lot of fun screaming at people, but their performances can’t help but feel like a retread of Joaquin Phoenix’s turn as Commodus. They’re like the Joker-fied version of Commodus, the plot simply doesn’t give them the space to carve out their own niche in this world. Denzel Washington, though, gives the best performance in the film because his character, Macrinus, never has to care about anything other than his own agenda, he gets to be unhinged the whole time, and he adds a delightful layer of camp to the proceedings.
Gladiator II is fine, it’s a big spectacle executed mostly well, it has a number of pretty fun and/or good performances, Paul Mescal is certainly a movie star, and Denzel Washington is having the time of his life. There are many worse ways to spend two and a half hours at the movies, I just wish Ridley Scott & Co. found a more original story for Hanno/Lucius, or at the very least they didn’t force him into a Maximus mold. This talented cast, most especially Paul Mescal, deserves a little more than David Scarpa’s script is giving them. Gladiator is so good, though, that its sequel can’t help but ride those fumes to a reasonable level of entertainment. Gladiator II: Are you not reasonably entertained?
Gladiator II will play exclusively in theaters from November 22, 2024.
