Review: Gladiator II

Posted by: Matthew Ardill  •  November 11, 2024 @ 9:00am

Filed under: Reviews

Okay, where to start with Gladiator II?

Let me preface all this by saying I'm a big fan of much of the early work of Ridley Scott. The Duelists is an incredible epic story based on history, Alien is a marvel of horror twisting sci-fi using the wind from Star Wars to shift the genre like one of Gieger's designs. Blade Runner took a weird book and made it into a genre reinvention; Legend too played with genre, giving us (in my mind) one of Tom Cruise's most unique performances; and Thelma & Louise, Matchstick Men, and the original Gladiator are all wonderful films that have a solid grounding in storytelling. Yes, the ones I liked the most did not perform the best and yes, he did have the occasional late stage hit (The Martian for example), but on the whole as his career proceeded, the returns diminished (see Prometheus, Alien Covenant, or like all the input he gave Blade Runner 2049 that Villeneuve sadly had to keep). In many ways, he's become a person where the people he's inspired inform his legacy more than his own body of work.

That brings us to Gladiator II. I'll break this review into two parts, a quick off-the-top get-in-and-get-out review for those who don't want to dive too deep, and then my detailed thoughts on this film.

I'll be the first to admit that there has been a void in the cinema in the space that sword and sandal action films used to fill. There haven't been that many, but the greats do include some of the greatest action films in cinema history (and I include Gladiator in that list). If you are a fan of those films – if you are the kind of person who sits around and thinks about ancient Rome three or more times a day or are just looking for some beefcakes getting all sweaty and violent – this is a film you will quite enjoy, so tap out here. Go watch the film, turn off your brain, and have a good time (and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that).

Now... let's dig a bit deeper. Set 16 years after the events of Gladiator, Rome is collapsing in on itself due to corruption and disease, its people spread too thin fighting famine at home and wars abroad. The twin emperors Caracalla and Geta (who were in fact real co-emperors) are making a mess. Tension in the city of Rome is kept at a low boil, only relieved with bread and circuses. Meanwhile, in strides a new gladiator, a mysterious young man from Namibia who, in the trailer, we're told is the son of Russell Crowe's Maximus and Connie Nielsen's Lucilla. He's brought to the city to fight for the two baddies sitting in the emperors' thrones by a schemer played by Denzel Washington. The allegorical potential for this and the current state of the world was overwhelming and I kind of wish it had come out a little while earlier (or maybe not... its message is kind of a mess).

Let's talk about the trivial stuff that, honestly, we can shrug off. I'm not a pedant like Niel deGrasse Tyson who's going to scold James Cameron for stars being in the wrong place when the Titanic was sinking, but I am a nerd who grew up reading encyclopedias for fun. The timelines are off. Set around 200 A.D., the two emperors did not become co-emperors until 211. Caracalla was known as a tyrant but he and Geta did not share the throne particularly long, and Caracalla continued to reign until 217 (and did not die at the hands of an usurper cousin). Macrinus was also a key figure in their reign, but as with the emperors, liberties were taken. The costumes are kind of a potpourri of inspiration and the setting of Rome remains a pastiche of tropes of the age, nothing to distract you but a bit fast and loose with history. A couple of items to its credit: the state of some other settings are quite accurate and the empire and population of Rome are quite diverse, showing how it was a cosmopolitan city made up of members of an Empire that spanned continents. So credit where it's due.

That all said, it doesn't really matter, as we're not going for a history lesson. This isn't a long, drawn-out, sexed-up HBO historical miniseries, so there are shortcuts that need to be taken in order to tell a good story, and that's fine as long as the story is good. This story is at best "meh". The cast is gangbusters – everyone delivers their best. Paul Mescal's Lucius does a really great job of channeling Crowe's energy from the original. Pedro Pascal as Marcus Acacius does not phone it in – he's playing a long-suffering general in an army of a nation he loves ruled by people he hates. Connie Nielsen's Lucilla continues to be a kind and loving mother, but hard as nails, and even folks like Derek Jacobi returning as Gracchus and Tim McInnery as the simpering Thraex were wonderful. But on the other side, you had performances that were, let's just say, problematic. Though I need to say not through any fault of the actors. Denzel Washington, playing the conniving weapons merchant and gladiator owner Macrinus, was making a sandwich out of the scenery and chewing it all up. Fred Hechinger as Caracalla is over the top mad with syphilis, and it almost creates a sympathy to the character. Meanwhile, Joseph Quinn's Geta is a pure evil tyrant, but all of this struggles under the fact there's just no meat there.

The reason why Maximus in Gladiator is such a hero is we got time with him. We got to watch him struggle to become a gladiator and spend some time in that role under the politics of supposed great men. Commodus was a terrifying foil to Maximus because we got to see the extent of his madness and depravity, but also his cruelty to his sister Lucilla, whose strength and courage was shown not told. Going into this film we get less than five minutes to establish Lucius as a good man and it's shakily done.

Denzel Washington's character being of African descent strays inadvertently into tropes that could be problematic. Thankfully, Washington, being a master of his craft, threads the needle; sadly, Quinn and Hechinger not so much. Queer-coded and creepy, they scan like 60s Bond villains more than anything else. They are cartoonish buffoons who wouldn't last a week regardless of the blood coursing through their veins. Honestly, Lucilla would have had them taken care of in short order and served as the Empress until her son was ready, but that's not how history played out, so they were painted into a corner. Thus, syphilitic nut job and weirdo goth boy it was. The worst characterization was Matt Lucus, the "game show host" of the Coliseum. He was bringing Bake Off energy, and it was annoying. I half expected Noel Fielding to jump out and for them to start juggling loaves of bread and making off-colour jokes. Seriously, Lucas should be arrested for crimes against camp for his delivery in this film.

The long and short of it comes down to the fact that Gladiator II is just dumb – you don't have enough time to develop any relationships with these characters. It leans way too hard on the first film to establish stakes and interest in these people, so it feels a little thread bare. At the same time, it's dense with plots and schemes and overlapping interests to the point it becomes kind of a mess, so it's at once too dense and too thin. Like most of late stage Ridley Scott films, Scott does not know when to leave well enough alone. He's infamously released seven different cuts of Blade Runner, a director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven, and the mess that is Prometheus. He's a fiddler, fiddling with stories until he has them just so. In recent years, that's taken the form of sequels and in this case, it's a sequel that the world didn't need.

I give this film two and a half Silly Russell Crowes Playing Zues out of five.

Tags: Gladiator II, Ridley Scott, Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Paul Mescal, Connie Nielsen, Paramount Pictures, Paramount, Gladiator

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