Gladiator ll review
Director: Ridley Scott
Writer: David Scarpa
Stars: Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger, Derek Jacobi, Connie Nielsen and Denzel Washington
Running Time: 115 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below
In the ever growing sequelification of Hollywood, it’s seem particularly egregious to launch a franchise so closely tied to a dead hero. If it seems obvious to us that Gladiator simply can’t move beyond the demise of Russell Crowe’s Maximus, surely the filmmakers can come to the same conclusion? Oddly though, a suitable answer is making Gladiator 2 quite different to it’s predecessor. Instead of another Best Picture winner, we get a Michael Bay-esque experience, a pretension-free sugary indulgence of expensive set pieces and sun-burnt brutality. It’s another occasion to celebrate 86 year-old Ridley Scott’s world building prowess. Again he builds us a very masculine, very brawny Rome with a bigger budget, better technology and a script that’s more summertime trash than awards prestige. Gladiator 2 does what the original was afraid of – leans into the outrageous lunacy of it’s historical era.
Yes, there’s the sweeping drama, but did the original Gladiator have a monkey brawl, a rhino duel or a flooded coliseum? Scott has decidedly leaned away from attempting to recreate the transcendent magic of the original and tried to do something more swashbuckling, more genre and much less serious. This capitulation to the ‘greatness’ of the original material is what makes Gladiator 2 such silly fodder to enjoy. It may be interested in retreading some of the old emotional beats, but it’s such a different, weirder monster – campy, hammy and full of blood and vinegar. Since finding another Russell Crowe has been Ridley Scott’s biggest casting problem of the last 24 years, he finds an interesting halfway point between Crowe’s Maximus and Kingdom of Heaven’s Orlando Bloom in newcomer Paul Mescal, who with a rugged face and boyish looks, plays the part of a young Lucius as a man caught between meditative stillness and raging bloodlust.
More importantly he’s a believable hero, physically imposing but not a product of Hollywood steriods. He’s relatable, likeable and embodies the Moses archetype of an exile, fighting against the Romans in their invasion of Numidia. He’s married to Arishat (Yuval Gonen), a striking but thinly written archer whose tragic demise is simply an artifice to help provide Lucius some much needed character development. Like a Ridley Scott greatest hits album, the opening battle of Gladiator 2 is an aquatic version of Kingdom of Heaven’s final battle for Jerusalem, with floating siege towers, copious CGI arrows, and roaring catapults flinging hefty flaming oil bombs onto scattering people. It’s the type of scene you’re here for, one Scott is so fluent in it could almost be Kingdom of Heaven 2.
By the time our hero returns to Rome, we meet Denzel Washington’s Marcrinus, a bi-sexual Roman gangster who, like Oliver Reed’s Proxima, trains gladiators for entertainment. But Marcrinus is more a machine of ambition than of humility. He’s monstrously delicious fare for Washington, who delights in playing him with an eccentricity that suggests improvisation. So often as he manipulates those of Rome’s elite power brokers, his rhetoric descends into the type of ultimatum-speak that Washington has mastered in a career awash with antagonistic personalities. He and Tim McInnerny, as Senator Thraex, are a standout as their friendly banter decays into ruinous demands.
It’s also a relief to see Connie Neilsen get a more complex return as Lucilla, who discovers her son’s return and watches his fate become her own. She’s still limited to a passive character, but at least she gets the opportunity to be a more defiant voice amidst a crumbling empire. Social upheaval is part of the fabric here as infantile joint emperors Geta and Caracalla fail to keep cohesion among their people. If winning the crowd was Proxima’s mantra, the new crowds of 211AD flock to the coliseum past Rome’s social decay – homeless, diseased, and disguarded, the people of Rome are demanding change as those in power struggle to cling to it. But before we get too serious, we get the kind of exotic battles one would hope: Lucius verses a formidable opponent on top of an enormous rhino. It’s the kind of gleeful spectacle that makes me somehow forgive Gladiator 2’s major flaws and fondly remember adult Hollywood cinema of yesteryear as one of flawed excess.
If the first Gladiator is a purely told hero’s story, the second Gladiator feels messier, the character arc of Lucius being lost somewhere between a revenge story and a revolutionary figure. Mescal is always game, but the plot is never completely clear on how his character changes from exile to emperor, swiftly bypassing his established trauma before if becomes too inconvenient to the next piece of sunset eye candy. Each gap in logic is filled so effectively by fast moving sequences of breathtaking scale, you be forgiven for missing the gaps entirely – in terms of visuals, Ridley Scott’s historical epics have never looked better.
It’s an experience of colossal style and just enough scant substance. Gladiator 2 is a grander, more aesthetically pleasing experience than the original, but the purity of the hero’s journey is lost amongst the kicked dust and leaking blood. Yet the deliciousness of the eccentric Washington as a villain proves very seductive. Scott’s history telling gives his antagonist a glorious stage on which to manipulate Rome’s rotten decline. Dialogue that should sound inane suddenly becomes saleable. It’s an experience of highbrow and lowbrow: highbrow drama ripped from the pages of Shakespeare's histories and lowbrow violence rendered in the excessive beauty only Ridley Scott can bring us.
