Gladiator II

dir: Ridley Scott

2024

In the world of cinema, or at least the chattering amongst film nerds, there have been longstanding jokes about certain flicks that could never, or should never have a sequel. Not the idea that a sequel couldn’t be made, but the far more salient point that it shouldn’t.

Titanic II is one of those jokes, and I remember a flick that actually exists called Hamlet II, with Steve Coogan, which is about how insane it would be to make a high school musical sequel to a tragic play where everyone dies in the end (sorry for the spoilers, but it’s only been out for 424 years or so).

On that pile of things that shouldn’t exist or be contemplated, and yet prove inevitable, you would have to say was the long-threatened Gladiator II. There was talk of a Nick Cave penned script that would have had had Russell Crowe return to the lead role as a warrior who fights his way out of the Underworld and has to kill Christ or something. This script exists. It is available online. All I will say about it is that Cave clearly wrote it when he was still on heroin, of that I have no doubt.

Before I pontificate any further, let me just mention that when the original film came out I thought it was a load of bollocks. I in no way thought it was a good film. So my bold, edgy position that there probably shouldn’t have been a sequel isn’t because I think the original is sacrosanct. It was bullshit then and it still reeks of bullshit now. And yet it had a commanding performance by Crowe as this badass stoic killing machine, who wants nothing more than revenge and death, in that order, in order to rejoin his family in the after life.

You know, like every second movie ever made these days.

They decided to go in a different direction, but decided, well, if you’re going to make a sequel to a gladiator movie, I guess it has to have a bunch of gladiators in it, and a lead character who’s a gladiator, so he can gladiate things and kill bunches of people. To say that this flick pretty much exists as a constant echo of the earlier film is something anyone could have guessed without hearing anything about it, but even then the timidity displayed in not wanting this flick to be its own thing, jesus christ, wow, it’s such a cowardly endeavour. They invoke Maximus’ name even more than that of the lead, here played by that delightful Paul Mescal.

Who is Paul Mescal? Well, surely he is a household name after the success of this flick. Surely? Even mums and grandmas will have his name and curly haired image on their lips and hearts?

Whoever he is (he was great, for my money, in Aftersun and All of Us Strangers recently, and he was pretty good / irritating in Normal People), he does his native Rome / Ireland proud in this flick, in the thankless role of someone whose sole job is to make everyone remember Russell Crowe’s turn in the first flick.

That’s all, nothing more.

This film also opens with a battle, but instead of it being a triumph, it’s a brutal defeat for the seeming protagonist, who sees his city burn and his wife die at the hands and arrows of the Romans lead by General Acacius (the great Pedro Pascal). Acacius takes no delight in the screams and sobbing of the survivors, all of whom are now slaves, but he does his duty for Rome, and for its two syphilitic emperors, being Geta and Caracalla (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger). That these two characters existed in actual Earth history and were far madder than anything depicted here is of no consequence – we’re meant to not think of Commodus / Joaquin Phoenix from the first flick, and yet everything they do is a pale imitation of him.

So there’s the gladiator, who goes by Hanno, and then by Lucius, played by Mescal, and you’d assume he must be the main character. There’s Acacius, who is weary of war, and who seems to be in conflict with the emperors, because they seem like fuckheads, but we’re not meant to think he’s the main character, even if he is married to Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) returning to the role she played as sister to the previous emperor, and daughter to Marcus Aurelius. The emperors aren’t main characters; they’re barely more interesting or threatening than the furniture.

But wait. There’s a guy called Macrinus, who also existed, and he’s played by Denzel Washington, who, I have to say, looks and acts like he’s having an awful lot of fun here. Maybe he’s the main character?

They do say that everyone thinks they’re the main character in every story, but we know it’s not true. Harro / Lucius thinks he’s the main character just because the flick seems to be told from his perspective, but there’s a strong case you could make that Macrinus is actually the protagonist here.

Denzel’s performance is so big it feels like everyone else didn’t get the memo. I don’t know what Ridley Scott said to him, but if he ever watched Training Day he might have mumbled something like “maybe do your Detective Alonzo Harris, but make him bisexual?”

You might think initially that he’s solely in the role that Oliver Reed had in the first flick, as a former gladiator turned owner of gladiators, who also has to drink himself to death, but he has a far nastier agenda at play, and as such, being a conniving arsehole seems to be its own reward. As such he truly is the one character and actor who seems to be having fun here.

Everything else and everyone else is fairly glum. Hanno / Lucius is understandably glum, having lost his wife and seeing all his chums slaughtered, but other than the script carrying him through the same hoops Maximus jumped through last time, he doesn’t bring the same energy to it. You can describe Crowe’s performance as a lot of things, but the one word you wouldn’t use is “glum”.

And also, not that it really matters in the scheme of things, because we suspend our disbelief when characters are shown as being good at certain things (like killing), but where we would have just shrugged our shoulders and accepted that Maximus, glorious general of Rome that he was, would be good at slaughtering people since he’d been fighting all his life, I kept wondering “why would Lucius be able to do that, how would he know this or that, why’s he good at fighting?” and the flick never gives an adequate answer to that.

I mean, it does give an answer, I just said it wasn’t an adequate one.

Boy howdy the retcon they pull here. It’s almost enough that the character is meant to be the same boy from Gladiator who so admired the Spaniard, as they called him, and whose mum seemed to have a lot of affection for him. They now have taken it a truly dumb step further, and implied that he has something more in common with Maximus than just a bad haircut.

They got as many people as they could from the previous film (like even Sir Derek Jacobi, reprising his role of Senator Gracchus), but shockingly most of them are only here to die and make Lucius feel bad. But considering how long ago that was, and how many people have dropped off this mortal coil since then, well, it would have been nice to see a CGI version of David Hemmings and his glorious eyebrows bellowing “The Barbarian Horde!!!!” as only he could. Matt Lucas is a pale, thin substitute (especially in the eyebrows department).

Not that this really stands as a definitive point, but considering how lacklustre Ridley Scott’s films have been lately (since at least The Martian in 2015), I have to think that it’s no coincidence that this flick shares with Napoleon a sense that Scott is saying that something decent is never going to be decided by a battle. So when the flick looks like it’s building up to a massive battle to decide the fate of Rome, I didn’t find it anti-climactic at all when it backs down from that entirely. I don’t know if it qualifies as an anti-war statement, but maybe the 87-year-old isn’t interested in that as the solution to all the world’s problems or as the necessary climax of every film.

I will not say that this is a good film. It is almost comical how timid and indebted it is to what came before. Much of Lucius’ dialogue and delivery is dulled or morose and in no way as witty or clever as it thinks it is. Everything is belaboured and signposted and underlined and repeated as if the film thinks the audience is on its phone throughout and needs constant reminders of how everything fits together again. The way they use the quote from Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid is just so cack-handed. I don’t mean Mescal’s delivery of the line. He says what he says, and everyone’s like “wow, he knows poetry!” But the thing is, he only knows that one line.

And his mother, doing that facial expression reserved for actors pretending they haven’t fully grasped something yet, which in practice looks like someone confused by a smell they haven’t as yet identified, trundles through to his childhood bedroom, where the words, in English mind you, are painted high on the walls.

Why… why would have put that quote on the walls of a child’s nursery? Did they even have nurseries back then? Why that quote? The only reason i can think of is that you’d have that quote so if you had any doubt that this person was your son twenty years later, you’d hear that and think “he must be my son, and how strange it is that someone painted that up there just for this moment, but I’m ever so grateful because now I have certainty.”

Other great moments – a guy reading a newspaper at a Roman café. That made me laugh. Or Macrinus mentioning that he’d read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which is quite an achievement, since they wouldn’t be published for several more centuries. But my favourite thing about him mentioning the Meditations, is that it’s like when someone responds in the affirmative when you ask them if they’ve read a certain book, and they say “Yes” in such a way that makes you think they’re desperately praying that you have absolutely zero follow up questions.

The quote of the flick, though, again goes to Denzel, and it’s a Cicero quote meant to show how little empathy this former gladiator has for humanity: the slave doesn’t dream of freedom, but of owning his own slave. Now that’s a stirring recommendation for the sanctity of human life.

It’s a novelty of a film. It probably shouldn’t exist. Denzel is great, Paul Mescal is okay, even if all he’s doing is cosplaying as Maximus, but none of it really means anything, or really resonates or sticks with you.

How could it, as a faded photocopy of a flick from 25 years ago?

5 times what we do in life mostly doesn’t matter, unless we’re mimicking Russell Crowe, in which case it echoes through eternity out of 10

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“Where we are, death is not. Where death is, we are not.” – um, I’m sorry, what? - Gladiator II