Good grief, Gladiator 2 is bad — maybe even Ridley Scott’s worst
Lowering your expectations can only go so far. Unfortunately Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II does not even rise to the level of enjoyable shlock. It is almost entirely irredeemable; an utter stinker of a movie outside of some decent production design and costuming.
In fact, Gladiator II is so bad it’s made me fear that, at 86, maybe Ridley Scott’s race is run as a director.
Let’s not kid ourselves: It’s been diminishing returns ever since the (unfair) flop of The Last Duel. From House of Gucci to Napoleon to Gladiator II it is a downward trend from the legendary director who is a famous workaholic and, four years shy of 90, seems to be busier than ever.
I had half expected Gladiator II to be a little bit like Ridley’s late brother Tony in style. The trailers gave me that impression: a bit more ridiculous and fantastical than the first film, a stronger concentration on action and, of course, the inclusion of Tony’s favourite star Denzel Washington.
And Washington is easily the star of the show but everyone in Gladiator II has been dealt a bum hand with a clunky, cliched, piss-poor script from David Scarpa (someone needs to stage an intervention and keep this man away from Sir Ridley).
We begin, after a watercolour recap of Gladiator’s best moments, 16 years on from the death of Marcus Aurelius. Paul Mescal plays Hanno, an average joe in Numidia living a serene life. After a cursory scene with his wife hanging out some washing the Romans arrive, ready to conquer the north African province.
This is because Rome is under the rule of war-hungry queer-coded twin brothers Geta and Caracalla. Their star general Acasius (Pedro Pascal) is tired of war and, after crushing Numidian resistance (Hanno’s wife Arishat is killed on his orders), he returns to Rome and begins scheming with wife Lucilla (a returning Connie Nielsen) to overthrow the corrupt emperors.
Meanwhile Hanno is captured in Numidia and, grief-stricken, soon falls under the charge of Washington’s Macrinus, a former slave himself with aspirations to rule Rome. Hanno wants revenge on Acasius and Macrinus sees Hanno’s gladiatorial talent as his ticket to get close to the wielders of power.
If that sounds similar to the first Gladiator that’s because it is: the mourning widower out for revenge, Rome with an unstable leadership relying on the Colosseum to distract the masses. Even Derek Jacobi is back for the ride, having aged remarkably little since 2000.
The problems come with Scarpa’s dialogue and a cast who aren’t talented enough to sell it.
Gladiator had the acting prowess of Richard Harris, Oliver Reed and Joaquin Phoenix backing up Russell Crowe. With Gladiator II Washington is good fun and Pascal is solid if unspectacular but the rest struggle to sell a script littered with bad lines and unearned callbacks.
Famously Crowe hated the script for Gladiator (He said: “Your lines are garbage, but I’m the greatest actor in the world, and I can make even garbage sound good”). No such luck for Gladiator II and we’re stuck with some tin-eared lines that yearn for impact but fall flat.
Back in 2000 Crowe probably was the greatest actor in the world. Mescal is not and he’s fatally miscast. His star performances thus far Normal People and Aftersun are both about internal emotion, wrestling with oneself but here’s he’s reduced to wrestling with CGI baboons and anger.
It soon emerges that Hanno is actually Lucius, son of Lucilla who had been spirited away from Rome after the death of Commodus. This means it should be Nielsen’s movie! Her long-lost son is out for revenge against her husband. Sounds juicy. This though is not explored at all and Nielson doesn’t even measure up in the scenes she is given.
The classic legacy sequel recipe of ‘do it the same but this time add more shit’ doesn’t work in the arena either. Rather than facing off in daring swordfights we’re given the aforementioned baboon showdown, a fight with a gladiator riding an over-sized rhino and a Colosseum naval battle replete with sharks! They’re all dull and missing the blood-and-guts of the original.
As for Washington’s scheming, it’s entertaining insofar as his performance is the only one with any magnetism but his good work is undone by the fact that within 40 minutes of this 150-minute movie, he already has an audience with the emperors and Hanno is within spitting distance of both of them.
But we require another 90 minutes of manoeuvering and plotting to get to the (obvious) climax of the film. Sigh.
There’s no denying that I watched the first Gladiator at an impressionable age: there’s a chance it was the first DVD in my parent’s house and that opening battle with the barbarians of Gaul is seared into my memory. ‘On my signal, unleash hell’. I still get chills now, the music, the mugginess of the battlefield, the scope of it. It manages to be both a revenge movie and a sword & sandals epic.
It holds a very cherished place in my heart.
Gladiator II holds no such place. Instead it has earned a place on the scrapheap.