GLADIATOR II - Mark Reviews Movies

Gladiator II, Paramount Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 21, 2024

When it was released in 2000, there was a certain novelty to Gladiator, because the era of the sword-and-sandal epic had passed decades prior and director Ridley Scott brought such grisly sights to the turbulent times of the Roman Empire. That film is still a great piece of old-fashioned entertainment, by the way, and Gladiator II tries to re-create the basics of its predecessor, right down to essentially sharing the same plot, while upping the degree of spectacle.

There's not much novelty in Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa's belated sequel, in other words, because we've seen this all before—done better 24 years ago and as part of the ongoing trend of legacy sequels. Some characters return here, including Connie Nielsen's Lucilla, the daughter of a Roman emperor whose dream of a land for everyone has been lost, and Derek Jacobi's Gracchus, a senator who apparently cannot escape being dangerously close to the center of various palace intrigues. Even the main character has a connection to the previous film, and once his true identity is revealed, the whole scheme of the movie really does feel like an intentional act of history repeating itself.

It's with diminishing results, too, noticeably in that main character. He is Hanno, a man who lives in Numidia on the North African coast, and played by Paul Mescal, a very capable and soulful actor who's quickly revealed to be out of his place here.

He becomes a man set on a mission of revenge, after a brief introduction to his doomed wife and a Roman naval siege on the city where the two live, but seems to be reveling in the glory and bloodshed too much for that motivation to be felt. As unfair but necessary (for at least two big reasons) as it may be, compare Mescal's presence here to that of Russell Crowe, who appears in a flashback, in the original film. Crowe's star-making turn never lost sight of the character's humanity amidst the carnage of the Colosseum and the political melodrama surrounding it. Mescal seems to be copying his predecessor's bravado without the underlying grief and vulnerability that made Crowe's Maximus so compelling.

Anyway, the opening battle is pure spectacle, obviously, filled with a fleet of galley ships, catapults and trebuchets, archers, mechanical towers to storm the fortress walls of the city, and up-close combat. Scott knows how to stage such sequences, and the constant raising of both the showmanship and the oddity of the action, which includes a fight against apes and a mock naval battle, is one of the more enjoyable elements of the movie.

The plot, set a generation after the first film, isn't, to be sure, especially since it's the same thing we witnessed a couple decades prior. Hanno is captured, sold into slavery, and becomes a gladiator, bent on vengeance against those who killed his wife, in the service of Macrinus.

Denzel Washington plays the gladiator manager with a kind of grounded gusto, in that he's cold and calculating while also offering moments of flamboyance that distract everyone from how devious his actual plans are. The original film gave us a single diabolical villain to hate, and in the sequel's consistent efforts to raise the stakes, it gives us three, including twin emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), who are so broadly, hollowly wicked that it's a very good thing about that third antagonist waiting in the wings.

The rest of this goes through the motions of the original, as Hanno fights in assorted arenas, including the Colosseum in a series of "games" honoring his adopted homeland's defeat, and gains an adoring crowd. He becomes a potential tool for political change and sets his eyes on killing General Acacius (Pedro Pascal), the man who ordered the killing of Hanno's wife in battle. The complication for us at first is that Acacius, plotting to overthrow the emperors and return power to the Senate, is married to Lucilla, which doesn't seem like a problem for Hanno—until his connections to the characters and events of the preceding film make it so. It's decent melodrama, although even Scarpa seems to believe that it has to be propped up by the audience's memory of and affection for the previous film for any of it to matter.

What's left, then, is the spectacle, which is ambitious, bloody, and, at times, decidedly but admirably strange. We get Hanno fighting against a vicious baboon (as the man adopts the ape's stance and tactics), outwitting a rhinoceros and its rider, and participating in that maritime battle in a flooded Colosseum, complete with very hungry sharks swimming around and feeding on anyone unfortunate enough to go overboard. The reliance on digital effects for these sequences is necessary, obviously, but it's also distracting, considering how real everything else looks and feels. That's not even taking into account how much more believable Scott's visions of Rome and gladiatorial combat were more than two decades ago, with less-advanced technology available to the filmmaker.

Some of this, particularly the conceit of the bigger action and Washington's performance, does rise to the occasion of a big-budget epic, determined to entertain on a primal level and justify the continuation of a story that didn't need any. However, Gladiator II stands in the shadow of its predecessor, attempts to exceed it, and is found wanting.

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