Devising a logical sequel to the Oscar-winning 2000 blockbuster Gladiator was not a self-evident task, given that the hero of the original, Russell Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius, does not survive the movie. Rather than go back in time and imagine an origin story for Maximus, director Ridley Scott and his longtime screenwriter David Scarpa (Napoleon, All the Money in the World) have chosen to set the story a generation after the events of the first film. That choice in and of itself was not a bad one: The prequel as an excuse for franchise extension has become such a cliché it’s generated its own genre of online joke (see: calling a particularly maddening news story or social phenomenon one’s “villain origin story”). But Gladiator 2 (or as it’s spelled in the opening title, Gladiator) sadly comes off as less a reinvention of the original than a curiously literal retread of its plot beats, characters, and themes.
Scott, still an active and relevant filmmaker at the age of 86, isn’t returning to this material to cash in on whatever audience was out there waiting for the follow-up to a 24-year-old swords-and-sandals epic. Having just looked at the early-19th-century face of tyranny in NapoleonScott, ever the history buff, now seems interested in turning his attention to power and corruption in Imperial-era Rome. At heart, Gladiator 2 is more a drama of palace intrigue than it is an action movie, even if Scott serves up a Roman-banquet-size surfeit of sword-clashing, shield-smashing, and helmet-bashing. Scott has always known how to direct a rousing grand-scale action sequence, but the advance of CGI has made those elaborate spectacles both less plausible and harder not to snicker one’s way through: Did we really need the full-on naval battle inside the Colosseum to be complete with circling sharks?
If you answered that question with a hearty “Hell, yeah!” then maybe Gladiator 2 is the holiday movie for you. But I make no guarantees that a taste for bread and circuses will get you through the dramatic longueurs of this two-and-a-half-hour saga, which would be intolerably dull but for the presence of one man—not our noble and self-sacrificing hero, but his canny archenemy. If Russell Crowe’s stolid star power was what made the first Gladiator memorable (even with stiff competition from a young Joaquin Phoenix as the mad emperor Commodus), what keeps Gladiator 2 afloat is the charismatic villainy of Denzel Washington as the deceptively easygoing courtier Macrinus. Paul Mescal’s Lucius, the nominal hero and long-exiled heir to the now-legendary Maximus, gets little more to do than to pine for his slaughtered wife and to grimly slog, increasingly outnumbered, through one fight sequence after another.
As Gladiator 2 begins, Lucius is living humbly as a farmer in a North African colony, though his ancestry is easy to guess from clues in one early flashback. (The reveal of his true identity is also given away in the movie’s trailer.) When Lucius is kidnapped by the Roman army to be sold into slavery after the murder of his wife—a setup that’s dispiritingly identical to that of the first movie—Washington’s Macrinus, a former enslaved person turned trader in human flesh, notices the young man’s fire and combat prowess and takes it upon himself to train him for the gladiatorial ring.
Meanwhile, the grandeur that was Rome is being run into the ground by two bratty, pleasure-seeking brothers, co-emperors Geta (Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (The White Lotus’ Fred Hechinger). These debauched and vaguely inbred-seeming despots, one of whom goes everywhere with a jauntily dressed monkey on his shoulder, are a far cry from Lucius’ grandfather Marcus Aurelius, the wise and principled leader of just two generations before.
On his arrival in Rome, the invincible and, not for nothing, hunky Lucius becomes a fan favorite at the Colosseum, where bloodthirsty crowds cheer as human bodies get torn apart by tigers or charged at by warriors mounted on rhinoceri (unfortunately, unlike in the 2000 film, there are no shots of lavish banquet tables groaning beneath platters of roast rhino head). When Lucius’ mother, the noblewoman Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, reprising her role from the 2000 movie), learns that her long-lost son is back in Rome and being regularly served up to wild animals, she visits him in his prison cell to attempt to heal the rift caused by their long-ago separation. Lucilla is married to the empire’s greatest military leader, General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), a good man who’s tormented by the pointless bloodshed of the emperors’ wars of conquest; like Crowe’s character in the original, he is secretly amassing a rebel army to reclaim Rome for the people.
Inevitably, Lucius and Marcus Acacius will be forced to face off in the gladiatorial arena, but when they do, it’s such a battle of Dudley Do-Rights that it’s hard to get up a rooting interest. Mescal and Pascal can both be wonderful actors in the right role, but they seem ill at ease as beefcake-daddy warriors in box-pleated miniskirts. Though they both look impressively ripped and can hack their way through a convincing fight scene, they never manage—unlike Crowe in the first film—to make brooding while brawny a dramatically engaging pursuit. Luckily, Washington is there to enliven the proceedings with his sneaky wit and unexpected line readings. (“That’s politicsssss,” he tells another character at one point, somehow investing that long “s” with such a cynical excess of meaning that he had the whole audience in stitches with a simple drawn-out consonant.)
When pedants came after Scott about the historical accuracy of some details in last year’s Napoleonthe venerable director of such genre-reinventing classics as Alien and Blade Runner hilariously advised his haters to “get a life.” And he’s right—it’s the touches of humorous excess in his recent historical epics (cf. Ben Affleck’s magnificently campy turn as a dissipated count in The Last Duel) that stand out as the films’ most memorable moments. The problem with Gladiator 2 isn’t the xenomorph-like design of the giant CGI baboons who are sicced on poor Lucius in the Colosseum; it’s the audience’s sense that we’ve seen much of this before, sometimes quite literally, as scenes from the original movie are revisited in recurring soft-focus flashbacks. Are we not entertained? Well, we were back in 2000.
