Cinephiles have had a full generation to guess what Ridley Scott’s long-mooted sequel to his Best Picture-winning Y2K megahit Gladiator might be called. Gladiators? Gladiator 2: The New Batch? The answer was right in front of us: Gladiator II aptly revives the portentous Roman numeral titling convention that began with the follow-ups to earlier Best Picture-winning blockbusters The French Connection, The Godfather, and Rocky. All hail from the 1970s, the decade in which Scott graduated from making commercials to making feature films.
There was also the question of what a continuation flick would be about, given that Gladiator climaxed with its hero, General Maximus—Russell Crowe, who won an Oscar for his brawny role—being slain and reunited with his murdered wife and son in the Elysian Fields. Crowe and Scott apparently kicked around the idea of reviving him somehow, or else setting the film in the afterlife. Goth godfather Nick Cave (yes, of the Bad Seeds) penned a wild-sounding screenplay that financiers rejected as just too weird. His idea, featuring an immortal Maximus fighting wars across centuries, might’ve been fun, but more likely would’ve resulted in a sour, tonally misjudged mess like Napoleon, the star-driven historical epic Scott brought us at this time last year.
So what Sir Ridley and Napoleon screenwriter David Scarpa have landed on instead is the sort of sequel where all the same stuff from the first movie happens to a different person (Gladiator Too?), who is in fact Maximus’ secret son! (Son of Gladiator?) And they get away with it, more or less, those rascals. Scott has wrung as much juice as possible from this silly premise, upping the ante on bread-and-circuses spectacle while abandoning even the modest effort Gladiator 2000 made to be about anything. Call it Gladiator: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, if you won’t bump on the fact that Gladiator II is a few minutes shorter and no gnarlier than its forebear.
Spencer Treat Clark, who was 11 years old when he played Maximus’ secret offspring Lucius in Gladiator, is still working. A few years back, M. Night Shyamalan had him reprise a role he’d played as a kid in Glass, a sequel to 2000’s Unbreakable. Gladiator II throws him over in favor of casting Irish hunk Paul Mescal as adult Lucius, even though the movie takes half its run time to reveal to us, and to him, that’s who he is.
Denzel Washington plays Macrinus in Gladiator II from Paramount Pictures.
You can’t blame Scott for recasting, because Mescal is one of the new film’s undeniable assets. A memorable presence in terrific art-house flicks like Aftersun and All of Us Strangers, Mescal is probably even less familiar to mainstream movie audiences than Crowe was when Gladiator hit in May 2000. But Mescal is easy to root for, soft-spoken and soft-eyed, convincing in the fight scenes, and holding the screen with authority even when paired with Denzel Washington, the movie’s real draw.
Washington plays Macrinus, a sort of mischievous variation on what was Oliver Reed’s role in the original—a former gladiator who was popular enough to buy his own freedom before he got into the dirty business of buying other men. Freed of any responsibility to carry the movie, Washington gives as unmoored and volatile a performance as he ever has, and it’s a delight to see such a venerable artist find still another grimy gear. Washington is the kind of cinematic monument who’ll always signal gravitas no matter how many Equalizers he makes; his love of high-grade trash is one of his most endearing qualities as a star.
Pedro Pascal is operating in a more familiar mode as Acacius, a Roman general who, like Maximus before him, has seen the corruption of the emperors and is planning a coup with his spouse Connie Nielsen—who is also, you may recall, Lucius’ mom. (Nielsen is a less surprising returnee from the original film than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him Derek Jacobi reprising his role as Senator Gracchus.)
Though the sequel arrives 24-and-a-half years after its precursor, it’s set only 16 years later, in 200 A.D. Title cards tell us that, under powder-faced twin Emperors Geta and Caracalla (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger, both appropriately dissolute), Rome’s decline has accelerated, albeit not as rapidly as our own Republic’s fortunes since Gladiator’s release. One scene about reviving the Roman Senate as a check on imperial power wouldn’t look out of place on MSNBC. On that score, Caracalla and Geta are afflicted by (respectively) syphilis and idiocy, weaknesses that Macrinus exploits to his own ends.
It’s a tangled plot, and the dialogue is often just as awkward. “Where we are, Death is not,” Lucius assures his men near the beginning of the film, right before most of them get killed, and again, 135 minutes later: “Where Death is, we are not,” he elaborates unhelpfully. Come again? This is certainly a less quotable movie than Gladiator, but that’s hardly the most meaningful distinction.
Gladiator was the one where Scott revived the sword-and-sandals genre that had been dormant for decades while also managing to suggest that our addiction to spectacle—one he himself had then been nurturing for 20 years—might not be altogether healthy, for individuals or democracies.
Gladiator II is the one where he throws in a CGI shark.
Gladiator II (R, 148 minute) opens at area theaters today.