2024
Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by Peter Craig and David Scarpa
Spoilers: moderate (arguably high, but not if you've seen the first three minutes of the movie, I'd think)
Even twenty-four years ago, I would have not have been of the opinion that Ridley Scott's Gladiator had need of any sequel, and this in spite of, or rather because of, my enormous affection for a movie that moved like myth, but I realized even then had the fragility of a fable. There is no "after" for the Rome of Gladiator, not that could be reasonably told; even the gentlest poke at its ahistoric bubble, and it would pop. I honestly don't know who was even asking for a sequel, let alone whether anyone was still asking for one two decades later, though there was, in the mid-aughts, a semi-serious go at doing a Gladiator II, with Russel Crowe even reprising the role of Maximus—this foreshadows what kind of project that was intended to be, though I don't think you'd ever guess from first principles what else it was going to be about (it was not a prequel, if that's where your mind went), and I actually do kind of wish that it had come to fruition, for it is possibly the single craziest logline I've ever heard in my life for a potentially-major motion picture. (The short version, which I assure you does not remotely fully describe a movie that, remember, was still going to be about a Roman born in roughly A.D. 145, is contained in its working title, Christ Killer.)
I suppose, then, that a Gladiator sequel was subtly percolating all along, though I don't imagine we have to overthink anything. We can safely assume that it was just something Scott was keeping in his back pocket until he'd expended his household-name capital on enough box office failures that it would behoove him, instead, to exploit the biggest hit of his career (I ran the inflation-adjusted math and Alien was his third). By 2024, that day had come (Scott hasn't made an unambiguously successful movie since his second-highest grosser, The Martian, in 2015), and Gladiator II barely performed the task of rehabilitating him as a bankable director, achieving numbers that sound entirely respectable—$458 million—but less so when you realize it didn't surpass Gladiator even in unadjusted dollars, and lesser still when you compare those numbers to a budget that, depending on what source you're looking at, or maybe just how you count it, seems just unbelievably sky-high. (There is a pre-tax break $310 million that I earnestly cannot find credible and stay sane, even if we're accounting for the 2023 strike and a temporary shutdown; and those tax breaks seem awfully egregious, themselves, at least in the case of Malta, a country literally smaller than the media company, Paramount, to which it gave a rebate of some 47 million euros.)
I'm getting off-track, but twenty-four years on, maybe a Gladiator sequel made more sense than it would have in 2006 or whatever; given Gladiator's thematic priorities, I was not, ab initio, ill-disposed to the idea of returning to Gladiator's mostly-allegorical pseudo-Rome to see how it, too, had squandered its opportunities for freedom and justice, though I don't ascribe any special prognostic power to Scott and this was clearly a total fucking accident of its release date, even if his (joint, rather than nonconsecutive) stupid blond emperors have their own insidious African advisor and everything. What would've surprised me, though it didn't because it was basically the first thing I heard about the movie when it was released, was that it wasn't just a sequel taking place in Gladiator's world, but as direct a follow-up as possible given the twenty-four year gap and the finality of Gladiator's ending. We've got ourselves a straight-up legacy sequel, to a movie where the entire story hinges pretty crucially on the legacy of Maximus Decimus Meridius having been eradicated. This is potentially spoiler-laden territory (hence the equivocal warning up top), but I'm kind of glad I knew already, because I don't believe I could have been really surprised by the revelation of this about halfway through (it's a revelation, let's also point out, only to the secondary characters): the combination of the last shot of Gianluigi Toccafondo's animated opening credits sequence* and the first shots of the movie proper—our hero, Hanno (Paul Mescal), meditating upon a pile of particulate matter in his hand much like the hero of the last movie would often do, suggesting that cradling particulate matter and portentously releasing it back onto the ground is some kind of heritable trait, hint hint—would pretty much have given whatever game the movie was playing away regardless; and if I hadn't known, I'd have sat there stewing in annoyance waiting for the movie to confirm what it had already told me.
This is more than just a whine, but let's get that plot out there: sixteen years after the death of Marcus Aurelius, and so some nebulous amount of time after the death of Commodus in this universe (though he didn't seem to reign for more than a few months), the Roman Empire has fully resumed its decadent trajectory into ever-more freakish, undeserving emperors that don't remotely look like the kind of people who would have filled the vacuum of power after Commodus's demise, and your guess is as good as mine if co-emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and his younger brother Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) are supposed to be the sons of Septimius Severus, and Gladiator II practically goes out of its way not to use any of its runtime to explain how this political situation came to be or, really, what the political situation is now, except it's basically "more Commodus from the first movie, with an even heavier, if you can believe it, Caligula gloss." Incidentally, I want you to grab whatever part of brain holds your knowledge about "the Roman Empire," and physically rip it out, because it won't do you any good anymore; this would've been sound advice for the first Gladiator, which didn't care about historical accuracy, but Gladiator II comes off actively disdainful of it—it's a difference hard to describe but I think you could readily identify from the first scene of the film, whereupon Scott has perceived a "need" to begin his movie with a battle sequence, basically just because Gladiator began with a battle sequence, except due to a desire for visual novelty (not solely "North African color grading" versus "Northern European color grading," but we'll discuss John Mathieson's photography later), and because this movie takes place during an imperial pause, Scott, screenwriter David Scarpa, and co-scenarist Peter Craig have elected to create an entirely new war against the foreigners of "Numidia," who'd been conquered and incorporated no less than 150 years earlier, and they might as well have called them "Vandals" or even "Carthaginians."
So Hanno (see?) and his warrior wife, Arishat (Yuval Gonen), take to the walls of their seaside city under their king (Peter Mensah), to defend it against Roman quinquereme siege engines, and they do not carry the day; Arishat dies, and (in the one really poetic passage of filmmaking Scott gets up to throughout) Hanno is enslaved, to be rendered back to Rome by the victorious Acacius (Pedro Pascal). Here, Hanno ends up the property of a wealthy ex-slave social climber, Macrinus (Denzel Washington), after demonstrating his skill—more importantly, his vengeful rage—towards some baboons. He quickly becomes the favorite of the Roman crowds and of the emperors themselves, though behind the scenes those emperors have their enemies, first Acacius—who, along with his more treason-experienced wife Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), is plotting to overthrow the unfit emperors—but while they do become aware of Acacius's scheme, they aren't aware that they're holding the real snake to their own breasts, because Macrinus surely isn't content with just being Geta and Caracalla's pal.
I'm sure this implies some of it, but I don't think this summary fully conveys how incredibly much Gladiator II is plain and simply Gladiator retreaded, with the same character types barely so much as renamed before they're run through the exact same scenario. At most, it's some real modest elaboration: Hanno is an outright enemy of Rome whose family was killed by Rome before his noble stature was reduced to slavery, which, I guess, is a little distinct from Maximus's weary cynic about Rome whose family was killed by Rome before his noble stature was reduced to slavery; Acacius is just Maximus; as noted, Geta and Caracalla are Commodus with, hypothetically, double the pleasure and double the fun; Lucilla, it probably goes without saying, is Lucilla, but with even less to do; Macrinus is the freshest element, and doesn't have much to do himself, for a very long time, besides be this movie's Proximo, only less likely than Oliver Reed to die in the middle of filming it.
Maybe it would have more juice if Mescal had more himself, but he's emphatically not filling Crowe's sandals, far less charismatic in his sullenness (and sullenness is his main mode), and the screenplay is cutting him off at the knees anyway: there's no real baseline or character here before his second act is already upon him and he's having weirdly Greek-themed afterlife visions (the insistence on mysticism, and upon deeply-held religious faith, that was such a major part of Gladiator, doesn't even reach the level of "window-dressing" here), and Hanno has rather less interesting aphorisms to spout, or maybe it underlines how Mescal's no Crowe and he's just much less accomplished at filling those aphorisms with sincerity. And they have a hard time simultaneously conforming to the Gladiator template (arguably, just having to "be about gladiators" is the fundamental thing hobbling Gladiator II) while still getting Hanno's story and the Acacius story to properly intersect; there ought to be something there, this man with every right to claim vengeance united with the target of his hatred by a common enemy and greater cause, and it is absolutely not, the difficulties of doing anything with this dynamic resolved via a structural trick that I'm annoyed that Scott, Scarpa, and Craig clearly thought was clever, leaving our boring lead actor alone with his boring acting again.
As it stands, then, the best "human" part of the movie is the collection of villainy Gladiator II offers, which is mostly all secondhand stuff, but it's at least enjoyable to watch half the secondary cast attempt to out-fey one another. At least it brings the film to some semblance of life whenever Quinn, Hechinger, or Washington are onscreen (or Tim McInnerney's Senator Thraex, because we've actually got four); on their merits, let's give it to Quinn for prosecuting the best "guys, let's just do Jay Robinson's Caligula from The Robe" performance** with Geta, screeching and carrying on and wearing pounds of eye makeup and spreading his cape like he thinks he's a terrifying golden bat (then again, the script is handing Hechinger's Caracalla the best material—let's just say "Consul Dondus," and if you know, you know—so he also gets to distinguish himself by playing Caracalla as crazy but also cognitively disabled); Washington gets the closest to a "real performance," naturally enough, with the chatter comparing it to Training Day which means that, sadly, The Tragedy of Macbeth went underseen because it's basically that, Washington marshaling his mannerisms in the same way and going even loucher, without defusing any of Macrinus's unsubtle threat. As the vessel for the film's only real "plot" material, or even "character" material, hell, even its main vector for the expression of its most interesting thematic material (Washington's enthusiasm about Macrinus's brutish anarcho-Hobbesian worldview being what makes it interesting), he'd probably have the best of it anyway, even if he weren't the best actor in the main cast (nevertheless, it remains a complete stalemate regarding which villain is getting returning costume designer Janty Yates's best efforts). But despite all this movie's runtime, we never really get sufficient amounts of Geta, Caracalla, or Macrinus, and they're backgrounded to the extent that Quinn's performance in particular does unfairly suffer, because he goes from "evil deviant" to "actually rabid" in such a binary way that it sucks some of the fun out of it even if he's striking the individual poses well.
There is, anyway, no equivalent to Joaquin Phoenix's much more fully-formed villainy here, in the same way there's no equivalent to Maximus, and a vast stretch of the movie seems animated purely by new arena concepts. I "like" all of the gladiatorial action here, though it's not so good as to overcome the grinding stretches between it, even when in some respects it's "better" than Gladiator's: your opinion of this will vary, and mine might actually veer negative, but Gladiator II does find Scott clearly incorporating Gladiator's criticism, and largely eschewing the impressionistic quick-cutting scheme of the first film to give the fight choreography more room to breathe (in some cases revealing that the fight choreography is fight choreography, and the two combatants are cooperating, which isn't "better" at all), but at least it's nice and physical and gory.
That's "physical" with some obvious caveats: probably my favorite action sequence in the movie is the private fight to the death held for Geta and Caracalla in the Domus Augusti's living room for a lunch party, and it's very cool, two sweaty, dirty men smashing through elegant furniture and scaring several bystanders who are standing way too close to these aforementioned sweaty, dirty, armed men; if it's also the "smallest" fight, maybe that says something, though I'm not a snob, and I got a kick out of the complete nonsense Scott's bringing to the rest of it, especially the miniature naval combat in the Colosseum (real) and the sharks (at a minimum, unattested).
The baboons, which are more like poorly-rezzed demon dogs, are also neat, though all of this should render questionable that budgetary figure I quoted; this barely looks more advanced than Gladiator, in part because a lot more of it is CGI. The movie, as a whole, looks substantially worse than Gladiator: I'm happy that Scott isn't totally just leaning on the increasingly-ossified aesthetic that began in Gladiator, and has made his recent movies so dreary to behold (reuniting with Mathieson probably helps somewhat with that, though I never blamed Dariusz Wolski for anything); and as far as Mathieson's Gladiator-esque penchant for shafts of light and backlighting goes, I don't have any particular problem with it. But Mathieson or Scott or the colorist or somebody simply went mad with power here, this feature-length exercise in color saturation, maybe oversaturation, and punched-up contrast. It can lead to some dubious results, frequently a glossiness that makes this Rome feel fake in a bad way, and sometimes it's quite unfortunate, depending on the skintone of the actor being photographed, something of a big deal considering Washington's centrality to everything here. (Meanwhile, although Mensah's king's name indicates that the touchstone was the Numidian, Jugurtha, the reproduction of Mensah on film suggests the touchstone was the H.P. Lovecraft character, Nyarlathotep; the silver lining, figuratively speaking, is that it's not wholly thoughtless with Washington—there is at least one very contrasty, almost darkness-swallowed shot of Macrinus, where it comes off very purposeful thanks to some very swell eyelighting.)
But what actually sucks about Gladiator II is just what I led with: it's a legacy sequel, and of course it has to twist to itself into knots to get there. I have a Gordian solution: don't fucking bother. Nothing good comes of it, and much bad. The most acutely bad thing that comes from it is the most utter failure of Arthur Max's production design, in that English inscription above Maximus's slave grave, the grave itself already being a wholly baffling proposition; but I don't know if any of it's useful, from the notion that "Hanno"—Lucius, bastard son of Lucilla and Maximus, grandson of Marcus Aurelius***—would not have formed a concretely "Roman" identity by age twelve that would survive the intervening years in barely-explicable "exile" in, uh, the Roman Empire, to the distasteful prospect that only the rightful king could save the kingdom, to the assassination it makes of a character who's not even in this movie, when Maximus's whole deal had been bound up in being a loving husband and father with the misfortune of being great at war.
That's all crap and it still isn't the real problem, it's that it spends so much time looping around itself on account of this, and for nothing. The actual movie, which is about Macrinus's sinister ambitions, can't even start until the 91 minute mark—obviously I checked—and Gladiator II's 148 minute runtime somehow feels much longer than Gladiator's 155, and it certainly should've felt shorter to me, considering the last time I watched Gladiator I started with the 171 minute extended edition until my blu-ray broke, and I tried circumventing the dead patch for ten more minutes before resorting to a streaming option. That's pretty damning, but Gladiator II is pretty dull; once Macrinus becomes the motive force of the plot (which is as much to say as "once Gladiator II achieves a plot that is not a beat-for-beat recapitulation of Gladiator"), it finally achieves some narrative drive. It's too little, though (the ending's no good, swerving from "a fable about political systems" into "painful wishcasting"); and, anyway, "91 minutes in" is simply too late.
Score: 5/10
*A painted cartoon that I would be willing to describe as "Dorota Kobiela-esque" though what it's really hearkening to is the Scott Free logo itself; it's possibly the coolest part of the movie, with the minor caveat that these days it's hard not to wonder if AI did it.
**Or maybe it's John Hurt, but I did also appreciate what I think is a straight visual quote from Cleopatra, of Richard Burton's "drunk admiral" Antony, with Acacius.
***Man, it would've been way more fun, and justified this relationship way more, if he were the son of Lucilla and Commodus.
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