Gladiator II

This may well mark Ridley Scott’s ghost-directing days because this one felt like it was something he actively didn’t take part in.

Set almost two decades after the death of Russel Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius Gladiator II follows a similar but new protagonist in Hanno (Paul Mescal) as he seeks vengeance for his wife’s death after she’s slaughtered during an invasion of his home by the Roman army. Subsequently captured and made a slave, Hanno steadily rises the ranks as a gladiator of the Colosseum, waiting for his opportunity to take down the man responsible for his misfortune, General Acacius (Pedro Pascal). Through his continued success in the arena, Hanno gathers support within his gladiatorial circles while gaining infamy within Rome’s upper class, putting him in the crosshairs of the corrupt twin emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) as well as the manipulative Macrinus (Denzel Washington). With every drop of blood spilled, Hanno is brought closer to his ultimate goal, with the question becoming whether he will live long enough to take his revenge or go down in a blaze of glory trying.

We should be able to have these kinds of slickly produced Hollywood epics — especially those of the sword and sandal variety — and when Gladiator II works, it actually isn’t half bad. Unfortunately, the good is never enough to cover for the sheer laziness and uninteresting nature of nearly everything else happening here, right down to a kind of filmmaking that I can only describe as “phoned in.” Following the same basic premise as the original, Gladiator II can’t move past its weird “legacy sequel” approach, with the connections to its predecessor being a problem for me that immediately lessens the value of a story that very well might have been able to stand on its own had the script taken a few more creative liberties with its narrative. 

Throw in the fact that even when being historically accurate — yep, the Romans did actually fill the Colosseum up with water and engage in naval battles as if they were floating out on the open sea — everything seemed so off and unrealistic (no doubt due to the iffy CGI effects as well) that by the end of it all, I just didn’t care about what I had just seen. Sure, Denzel is great and made the watch worthwhile at times, but for as fun as he was in his role as Macrinus, he felt entirely out of place in a movie that in all honesty, should have just focused on him, his rise within the Colosseum, and the politics involved in said rise. 

Gladiator II is a too-little-too-late sequel that fails to justify why it needed to get made in the first place, let alone over 25 years after the fact, with its uninspired casting, rehashed story, half-assed character work, and uneven production taking away from what little works here, namely, Denzel’s performance and some mildly entertaining Colosseum fights. Take away the unnecessary connections to the first film and punch up some of the more uninspired story beats, and maybe there’s something here worth exploring, but by the time the credits rolled, Gladiator II felt like a forgettable mess that it seemed Ridley Scott couldn’t have cared less about.