If you’re wondering if Ridley Scott has continued his quest to tear down his filmography’s iconography, Gladiator II (or, as it’s stylized in the credits, GladIIator) is a resounding… maybe? Unlike works like Alien: Covenant or Napoleon, the barbarian hordes of self-analysis that Scott’s unleashed have decided to spare Rome from a total sacking this time around, and it’s fascinating to think that Scott might consider this his baby. Unlike the franchises he shepherded into existence, this is still his: No filmmaker would dare enter the Coliseum of public opinion to take on a game of oneupmanship with the reigning champ. Yet that makes this sequel interesting: He’s not trying to outdo himself, instead steering the enterprise closer towards something his brother might have made (in content at least, not in form — he knows there’s no imitation there). It’s a fascinating mixture, though it’s not without a certain amount of tonal chaos.
You can see a little bit of Tony Scott in the Rome of 200 AD, which synthesizes Scott’s portrayal of Pax Romana-era imperial glory and Tinto Brass’ Bosch-like depiction of the depths of Roman depravity in Caligula. The ironic thing is that for all the historical details Scott gets wrong or sacrifices for the sake of storytelling, this was a great and terrible time to be a Roman, more so than in Caligula or Nero’s day: From here on, there’s nothing but a steady decline. You can see it in the reign of the twin emperors, Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), the former a dull yet violent narcissist with a soft spot for his brother, the latter an impressionable moron whose brain is being rotted from venereal disease. Commodus’ death didn’t make the Empire more stable or free, after all, and it’s a wonder they haven’t been killed by the start of the film — the Romans recently had gone through five in a single year — but General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) has his plans.
Fresh off of a conquest in the province of Numidia (Algeria, today), Acacius has grown weary of battle, exhausted from watching good men die for the personal glory of these tyrants. He feels each loss painfully — when a Numidian archer (Yuval Gonan) kills his second in command during the assault, he demands his bowmen to ensure she dies, gripped with grief-fueled rage as he watches the woman take an arrow to the chest. He wants the Republic back so that the men and women of the city might rule justly, as his wife’s father once did. That was Marcus Aurelius, and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) supports her man in his efforts. The only problem is that there’s one very big loose thread that the fates are ready to pull: The matter of her son, who disappeared into the night at her urging, to spare him from the chaos that would inevitably follow after Commodus died.
Unbeknown to either of them is that Lucius (Paul Mescal) is already back in Rome, though not to stake his claim for the throne. In a perfect inversion of his father’s introduction in the first film, he’s a victim of Rome’s imperialism: The city Acacius conquered was his home and, worse, the archer his men killed was his beloved wife. He came to love his life in Africa and spurned all things Roman, as there was nothing but pain to be found in the city of Aeneas. Who could stomach a city that killed his father, Maximus, for their entertainment? Yet he’s bound for a similar fate, as he’s barely left the slave ship before he’s placed into an arena, forced to fight vicious monkeys at the gladiator equivalent of a farm team tryout. He’s a vicious motherfucker, biting one of the baboons before choking it to death with his chains. This spectacular violence catches the eye of Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a power broker and gladiator owner, who immediately buys him up. Lucius plays coy about his identity, and Macrinus takes notice of this. He thinks he’s bought a fighter when it soon becomes clear he might have bought a pathway to the throne. He tells the gladiator he can have anything so long as he performs, and Lucius only wants one thing: Acacius’ head.
Based on the advertising, you probably already know that Macrinus is a man of his word. You might not know that Denzel is an absolute force of nature in this movie, eschewing the stern stoicism that’s defined much of his work in the past decade for a scenery-gnawing binge. It’s as if he found the perfect middle point between Macbeth and Training Day, with the regal scheming and ruthlessness chased by a general affability. The guy is a ham, even when he’s pulling out severed heads at the dais in the senate, rotating the dead-eyed gaze of his vanquished foe so that every senator gets a chance to make eye contact. It’s brilliant work, and he steals every scene he’s in — a fitting tribute to Tony Scott, in a strange way, given that Ridley’s doing what his brother might have done. That said, Mescal’s not bad either – he cuts a different figure than Russell Crowe did, resembling in tenor and presence a young Alec Guinness had he gone into sword and sandal epics set a millennia before T.E. Lawerence’s time. He has no insta-iconic moments like the “Are you not entertained?” bit, but that’s to be expected; there’s no topping that.
That, weirdly enough, sums up the entire ethos behind Gladiator II. Scott knows he can’t beat what he created and chooses to console himself by expanding his purview and scope. Bits and pieces of the Nick Cave script that became such a legend online carried over into the final screenplay, with VFX finally becoming affordable enough that they can have those naval battles Scott once deemed too expensive. The supernatural elements are, sadly, relegated to dream sequences, but the breadth of that draft’s imagination endures in that sequence’s splendor. Watching Mescal command a miniature warship in a reenactment of the Battle of Salamis, all contained within the Coliseum, is something to behold. Based on that scene alone, I’d say this was a sequel worth making, even before one brings up Denzel.
The only issue is that these fantastic moments are a little too far apart. Scott’s palace intrigue is split between too many groups, and it’s never as interesting as it should be or as complex as it thinks it is. At a certain point, you’re just waiting to see who will murder these emperors and how they’ll get killed in return by the next power-hungry and/or high-minded assassin. Worse, the film plays coy about Lucius’s identity for the first half, in which we’re asked to try and pretend that the entire basis the film was sold to us on is some grand reveal. In Mescal not getting one of those moments, we forget that Crowe’s address to the crowd served a narrative purpose, as he chose that moment to reveal his identity as an honored Roman soldier to both Commodus and the Coliseum crowd. There’s nothing like that here, and it’s weird in context, especially when the film heads towards its grand climax — it’s hard not to imagine each extra involved in the finale is asking themselves one question: Who the fuck is that guy?
On the other hand, it’s a Gladiator movie. At a certain point, one is just swept up into the internally consistent meathead logic and appreciates it for what it is: A portrait of the Romans as the West sees them in all of their filthy and regal glory. Scott doesn’t need to do any legacy-shredding here, Rome did that to itself. Maximus’ sacrifice didn’t stop the wheels of time from turning; his son is another Cincinnatus, who would rather go back to his fields than lead, and even the glory days of Marcus Aurelius weren’t so rosy for all involved, as you’ll find out here. The ancient world is a funhouse mirror of our own. For every detail we notice that strikes us as decidedly modern, another reminds us of just how brutal and warped that time would be to our current sensibilities (and one has to imagine this being the perspective a future person might have of our civilization). Gladiator II might not be its predecessor’s equal in all regards, but Scott remains unparalleled at threading the needle between myth and history without sacrificing any of the spectacle. That, folks, is entertainment.