*½/****
starring Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Connie Nielsen, Denzel Washington
screenplay by David Scarpa
directed by Ridley Scott
By Angelo Muredda Late in Ridley Scott’s woefully derivative sequel Gladiator II, the titular gladiator two, Lucius (Paul Mescal), comes upon a secret shrine for his thematic and–surprise–genetic predecessor, Maximus (Russell Crowe). Introduced both long after a perfunctory opening animated credit sequence by Gianluigi Toccafondo that paints Rotoscoped-looking images over a reel of Gladiator highlights and well into a tired narrative that retraces the thinly-plotted original, beat for tedious beat, the shabbily decorated hovel, adorned with Maximus’s armour and a silly English engraving of his catchphrase “What we do in life echoes in eternity,” feels awfully cheap–fresh from the imagination of ChatGPT. Its memorial-from-Wish-dot-com aesthetic only makes the concept of a reverential successor to the populist hit Gladiator, 24 years in the making, seem even goofier than it already does.
Maximus, it turns out, shouldn’t have drifted off so peacefully to Elysium at the end of the first film, satisfied that he avenged his murdered wife and son and set the post-Commodus Rome on the path to Marcus Aurelius’s dream. His dying wish for a better Rome to succeed him, treated as a real utopian possibility last time around, has been cynically dashed in the same tone of Poe Dameron pronouncing that “Somehow, Palpatine returned,” all to generate another kick at the can in a franchise with the awkward problem of a dead protagonist. What a tribute Scott has offered his old Academy Award-winning hero, retconned into dying in vain so that his illegitimate first son can pay off his life’s work in a legacy sequel thirsty enough to forge a lineage out of the only surviving character under 30. What we do in life barely seems to echo for about 20 years in a dreary sequel that joylessly rehashes scraps of the original as sad offerings to a fandom that presumably watches it yearly on TNT.
Though Lucius’s political future seemed bright at the end of Gladiator, with his stately mother and Maximus’s former lover Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) at his side to guide him until adulthood, when we meet him again he’s spent 16 years in exile, secreted away by Lucilla after Maximus’s death lest he become a political target for incompetent and bloodthirsty twin Emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger). Since we last saw him, the exiled prince has relocated to North Africa, rechristened himself Hanno (which doesn’t have the same spark as “Maximus”), and taken up arms against the violent colonial expansion of the Roman Empire he was on the verge of inheriting, his wife Arishat (Yuval Gonen) at his side as he delivers inspiring speeches about death and life peppered with wisdom from Epicurus. Like the Roman general turned gladiator who sired him, Lucius soon finds himself bereaved and sold into a life of violent combat after a devastating ground invasion of his home by sombre Roman general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), who immediately lands on his enemies list despite secretly being his stepfather and Lucilla’s partner, and who has a Maximus-like plan to wrest Rome out of the control of bad leaders. Bought and trained by gladiator whisperer and scheming political striver Macrinus (Denzel Washington), Lucius proves himself in the arena against any number of baboons, sharks, rhinos, and burly men, his growing celebrity bringing him to the Colosseum, where he upends the plans of Lucilla, Marcus, the twin Emperors, and finally even Macrinus, who has his own designs on the empire.
Where Scott revelled in tangential world-building in Prometheus and especially Alien: Covenant, adding a genuinely new wrinkle to the Alien mythology in Michael Fassbender’s Satanic David, here he’s running on creative fumes–recycling plot elements and even character trajectories from Gladiator rather than organically building out from the world he’s already made. Derek Jacobi is taken out of cold storage as the returning Senator Gracchus, still unimpressed by his Emperor(s)’ corruption and still waiting for a time when the Senate might do some good. Nielsen divides her time between her same old spot in the stands from the first film, anxiously rooting for Lucius as she rooted for Maximus, and backstage in the gladiators’ quarters, whispering words of encouragement to her son as she did her lover. Although there’s some novelty to the feral baboons Lucius faces in his opening trial, none of the subsequent action set-pieces raise the pulse anywhere near the first film’s man-on-goon-on-tiger combat. Nor do the more story-oriented battles live up to the pulpy kick of Crowe’s beefy magnetism facing off against Joaquin Phoenix’s foppishness as Commodus.
It doesn’t help that neither Mescal, a fine actor, nor Pascal, a gregarious, impossibly likeable presence on the red carpet and in viral “Snack Wars” videos and “Hot Ones” episodes, has the raw star power or gravitas to make something of the thin gruel of the plot, which is structured like a Metroid game, where a weakened Lucius is forced to regain his powers bit by bit before achieving his final form as Peak Gladiator. Sensitive and warm in quieter moments where he’s laughing with his fellow gladiators, Mescal gets washed off the screen any time he’s opposite Washington, while Pascal has little to do besides frown. Thanks to the actors who play them, Lucius and Marcus are affable chaps, but you can’t imagine why anyone would follow either of them into the ring.
That’s less true of Macrinus, the only character with motivations worth guessing and the one most betrayed by a rushed third act. Washington eats up his role as a more canny, sociopathic variant of Oliver Reed’s Proximo in Gladiator, a charming but resentful bon vivant who glides through high society without quite being a part of it, and whose shadowy reason for wanting to amass power is no less compelling for its predictability. It’s a shame Washington has so little to play off in his nice-guy castmates. Macrinus’s deflating ending is predetermined because a win would undo the textureless, unproblematic heroics we’re supposed to be invested in–the stuff of shrines and inspirational quotes before battle. Like Fassbender’s David, he’s the smartest person in any given room; this time, though, Scott wants us not to laugh at or pity those with the misfortune to meet him, but to be invested in their hollow familial and political dramas. A Richard III type in a field of flavourless do-good Earls of Richmond, Washington’s Macrinus is about the only reason to even have a Gladiator II. If there’s a Gladiator III, bet on Macrinus getting his own dedicated shrine for his son, probably a background actor in Gladiator II, to find.
