Much like last week’s new release Red One, my girlfriend expressed a desire to see Wicked with me, so I won’t be seeing it just yet. However, there was another big release this week in the form of director Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II. I wasn’t overly impressed by the first trailer as it reminded me an awful lot of the plot of the 2000 original starring Russell Crowe, but there has been this thing lately where much-later sequels have impressed me despite the trailers way more than I thought they would. I didn’t care much for Top Gun, Blade Runner, or Twister, and didn’t exactly have great hope for the Beetlejuice sequel, but then I ended up really liking if not outright loving the likes of Top Gun: Maverick, Blade Runner 2049, Twisters, and even Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. I was never a really big Gladiator fan, but it wasn’t a bad movie. I’m just not sure why we needed a sequel this many years later, particularly since Crowe’s Maximus died at the end of the original.
Huh. A good deal of what I wrote up there is an awful lot like what I wrote at the start of my Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review. Will I end up liking Gladiator II as much?
16 years after the death of Marcus Aurelius from the first movie, his grandson, and son of Maximus, Lucius (Paul Mescal) is living in the free city of Numidia with his wife Arishat (Yuval Gonen), preparing for the eventual attack by the Romans to take the city. That attack comes as led by General Acacius (Pedro Pascal), one that ends with Arishat dead and Lucius, going by “Hanno,” a slave to the Romans. Lucius/Hanno is set up as a potential gladiator, and when he does well in a make-shift arena, he’s purchased by one Macrinus (Denzel Washington). Macrinus knows a good gladiator when he sees one, and he takes the man he knows as Hanno to Rome to fight in the games that the twin emperors, Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), are throwing in Acacius’s honor. Lucius goes along with this as Macrinus is promising the young fighter that, should Lucius prove successful in the arena, he will get his chance to take on the hated Acacius himself.
Except it’s not quite that simple. Acacius hates his work and wants to end the wars that the twins keep sending him on, and he’s married to Lucius’s mother Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, one of the few returning cast members), who wants nothing more but to achieve her late father’s dream of a free Rome under the control of the Senate. Meanwhile, Macrinus himself has plans of his own that are no doubt contrary to everyone else’s as they vie for power in Rome. The thing is, it may very well all come down to a single, inspiring gladiator, and Lucius doesn’t seem to care much for anyone’s plans. He hates Acacius, isn’t happy with his mother for sending him away as a child, and really doesn’t care much one way or the other about what Macrinus wants. With the Emperors mostly there for their own amusement, will we not be entertained as Lucius does what he does?
So, bottom line here: I did not love this movie as much as the other late-coming sequels. There’s nothing really wrong with it. Scott can do spectacle very well, and the battle sequences when they come up are fairly impressive on one level, but a bit shallow on the other, and that is how I more or less feel about the movie as a whole. Scott, as a director, has produced some all-time classics like Alien, The Martian, and even The Last Duel, but I tend to find him hit-or-miss considering he also made movies like Alien: Covenant, Exodus: Gods and Kings, and Napoleon. I figure he makes a really good movie every three or four movies. This one? It’s a lot of spectacle, and that should make it something of a crowd-pleaser, but that’s about it.
What helps are the performances of much of the cast. Washington in particular looks like he’s having a ball playing his character, and Pascal gives his character a real pathos such that it becomes clear he doesn’t really deserve to be on the receiving end of Lucius’s rage. I think Nielsen also did pretty well revisiting her role, and of the two emperors, I think Quinn comes off pretty well as the one who has some political savvy even while being a hedonistic jackass. The big problem is Mescal’s Lucius. He’s basically a one-note character in many ways, maybe two in a good moment. The script doesn’t give him a whole lot to work with–unlike both Washington and Pascal–and he’s basically something of a generic good guy in a world of corruption. There are even a couple moments where I think he makes decisions based entirely on what the plot says he has to do. I don’t think it’s a bad performance, per se, but there’s not a whole lot to it, and I think that comes mostly from the script that gave a lot of deeper motivations to seemingly every character except Lucius. Basically, he kinda disappears in the narrative with all the more flamboyant or nuanced performances happening all around him. I wasn’t really sure what to grade this one, but I am ultimately going with the grade I do based entirely on the acting from the main cast with the exception of Mescal, and that’s mostly because of the script there.
Grade: B-
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