The most famous line from Ridley Scott’s original Gladiator (2000) film is an easy one to remember. Russell Crowe’s Maximus scornfully bellows to the assembled crowd, “Are you not entertained?” He’s not just speaking to the onlookers, he’s speaking to us, the viewers at home.
When it comes to Ridley Sequel, I’ll save the answer to that question for down below. First, let me just say that Gladiator II is a truly terrible film in almost every way imaginable, making even its wildly bombastic combat dull and trite. As one gladiator slave says to another as they enter Rome, “I never knew how bad it would stink.” It’s all style and no substance, the kind of film you are consciously aware of from one scene to the next. A good film transports you into another world. A bad one keeps reminding you that you’re watching a movie. Gladiator II is a bad movie, top to bottom.
I found myself playing little games in the arena of my mind throughout the 2-and-a-half hour slog, such as “Count how many ways this film is just repeating the first film’s plot!” (I lost count) or “Can you find character development, any character development at all?” (I found none).
Gladiator II is a very peculiar sequel. Usually, sequels have a pretty straightforward job: Continue the story of the previous work. This one simply repeats it, from start to finish. I’m reminded a bit of The Force Awakens, which also repeated many of the exact same story beats as A New Hope. It was simply . . . more subtle (Starkiller Base notwithstanding).
There are some redeeming qualities to be found in Scott’s latest directorial disaster. Capable fight scenes are few but when they’re good, they’re a welcome respite. The actors, meanwhile, all do their best with the script they were given. Paul Mescal shows promise, though he’s no Russell Crowe and thus cannot carry the weight of this film on his shoulders the way Crowe carried its predecessor. Crowe, with his piercing visage and commanding presence, had help from Joaquin Phoenix as the mad emperor-in-waiting, Commodus. Mescal has help from Denzel Washington, who reprises his role as Alonzo Harris from Training Day (2001).
That’s not really meant as a dig at Denzel, whose portrayal of the power-hungry gladiator master, Marcinus, is as charming and enjoyable as you’d expect—even if his character is a jumbled mess, his motivations blurry and his rapid rise and fall from power entirely absurd. After all, the rest of the movie is equally preposterous.
There are returning characters. Scott brings back Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla so that she can be sad and make the same mistakes her character made in the first film. Derek Jacobi is trotted out to film a scene or two, though I think the I, Claudius star—and we moviegoers—deserved better.
Newcomers are also given short shrift. Pedro Pascal feels wasted as General Marcus Acacius, something of a Maximus-lite, sharing that role with Mescal’s Lucius. Pascal is a much-beloved Hollywood star at the moment, but roles like this are less than flattering. Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger give it their all as a pair of mad emperors, giggling and gesticulating in a futile effort to out-Commodus Commodus, but I’ve seen Caligula (1979).
Besides, there’s very little of the brothers’ madness and its impact on Rome that the movie ever bothers to actually show us. Oh they party and like to watch gladiators fight? Doesn’t everybody in Rome? Panem et circenses. So we are left to our imagination, with a little exposition to fill in the blanks. Are we not entertained yet?
Here is a useful maxim: Show, don’t tell.
This City Is Diseased
So we have a film with a plot almost identical to the first film, but far less interesting or emotionally impactful (not that the first film was by any means perfect in those regards). What, then, does the sequel bring to the proverbial coliseum? I would argue the answer to that question is “Nothing.” Worse than nothing.
Prequel films often fall into a trap. They try to over-explain what came before. They give us midichlorians. They tell us how the magic works and then the magic is lost. Every magician knows you never spill your secrets, but Hollywood just sees dollar signs.
Sequels can fall into a similar trap. They can break an ending.
The have just one job: Finish the story. Or, if you’re very clever, shine a new light on that story. Make us see things differently, from some new perspective.
A bad sequel takes a perfectly good story, with its emotional zenith and catharsis and all its threads tied in bows, and breaks it on the very same stone so many prequels are shattered upon: Vanity.
Gladiator II is that kind of sequel. Beyond its derivative plot (which may be too gentle a word), it tells us a story that nobody asked for and never needed to be told and does so in a way that cheapens the original. Rather than expand and enrich the story of Gladiator, it treats Maximus the same way so many modern films and TV shows treat beloved things of the past: As a reference. As nostalgia. Oh look, here’s Maximus’s breastplate (which will later become literal plot armor). Here’s his sword. Here’s a flashback.
Also, by the way, Lucius is Maximus’s son! That might have been an important detail to include in the first film! Maximus must have carried enormous guilt over the affair once he learned his wife was slaughtered. So much for strength and honor. Let’s not pay attention to any of that, here’s a rousing speech!
These are all just empty gestures at a character whose story is already told, whose heroic journey came to an end and whose death held meaning. That it’s all simply wiped off the table—somehow the Emperors returned!—so that we can tell his son’s story (which just so happens to be the exact same story) diminishes Maximus and the original film. We are left with less than we had before.
That’s worse than nothing.
CGI Gone Wild
There is a certain level of arrogance that goes into films like Gladiator II, that rely so heavily on CGI and upon audiences accepting that CGI unblinkingly.
There is so much CGI in this movie. Rabid, slavering baboons for our heroes to fight. A gladiator champion riding the back of a CGI rhino, looking more akin to an Elden Ring boss fight than something you’d expect in a historical epic. CGI sharks zip around the flooded arena and I kept hoping one would pop up and say, “Gladiators are friends, not food!”
CGI as far as the eye can see, and all of it serving one purpose and one purpose only: To impress us with spectacle. Are we not impressed? At least it’s bright and colorful. The original was, as the late Roger Ebert put it at the time, “muddy, fuzzy, and indistinct.”
“By the end of this long film,” Ebert wrote, “I would have traded any given gladiatorial victory for just one shot of blue skies.”
Well, blue skies are here in abundance in Gladiator II, which certainly amps up the lighting and saturation, but Scott still never bothers to convince us we should actually care about the characters scrabbling down in the dirt or in the marbled halls of Roman empire. Things happen to them, then they do things, then other things happen, then the end. There is no tension, no surprise, no sense that characters’ choices really matter. There are few moments of humor, or those little human things that help us relate to these people as people to root for—or against. The big choices characters do make are all almost incomprehensibly stupid.
Oddly, the character I found myself empathizing with the most in the end was poor, mad Emperor Caracalla, whose venereal disease has spread from loins to brain, and whose mind is quickly unraveling. One moment he’s a savage beast, screaming to crucify Lucilla. The next he asks sadly if she really has to die. He appoints his monkey, Dondas, First Consul of Rome, and a part of me was genuinely rooting for that monkey. At least it was a real monkey, not some CGI monstrosity. And Caracalla’s love for Dondas, in those few brief scenes, felt more sincere and genuine than any other human emotion this film aped.
So, to answer Maximus’s question: Yes, I was entertained. Bad movies can still be entertaining. I knew almost from the start that this was going to be a step down from its predecessor, but it was still fun to discover just how far it would exceed my expectations in that regard. But a few half-decent fights, some grisly deaths and one brave monkey does not a good movie make. I am left wondering, with all that experience and all that money and all that passion, why didn’t Ridley Scott pay for a better script?
Or better still, left well enough alone. Here is another useful maxim: Sometimes less is more. In Gladiator II’s case, much less. Nothing at all, in fact. This is a film that does not need to—and should not—exist. My verdict? It’s right up there at the top.
I recently went to Wicked and you can read my review of that film right here. If you’re looking for more historical Roman drama, check out Rome on HBO. It’s great.
Have you watched Gladiator II yet? What did you think? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.
