Lengthy earlier than “interested by the Roman empire” grew to become shorthand for having a hyper-fixation, Ridley Scott turned the precise Roman empire right into a mainstream obsession. In 2000, the director’s sword-and-sandal blockbuster Gladiator muscled its method into turning into that 12 months’s second-highest-grossing movie, earlier than profitable the Academy Award for Finest Image and cementing its standing as—I’m simply guessing right here—your dad’s favourite film of all time. “Are you not entertained?!” Russell Crowe’s Maximus goaded the gang in a memorably rousing scene. We actually had been: Right here was an nearly absurdly easy story of revenge that Scott, through visceral battle scenes (and actual tigers), become a maximalist epic.
For Gladiator II, now in theaters, Scott has one way or the other taken it a step additional. The sequel has twice as many heroes to root for and twice as many emperors to root in opposition to, plus a wild card within the type of Denzel Washington’s conniving arms vendor, Macrinus. In lieu of tigers, battles within the enviornment now contain a menagerie of baboons, sharks, and a rhino. Even the opening credit have been designed to excite the viewers: Key scenes from the earlier movie are animated in a painterly sequence, which lands on a title card that stylizes the sequel’s title as, gloriously, GLADIIATOR. It’s so grandiose, the viewers at my screening began applauding earlier than a single battle had begun.
Set 16 years after the occasions of Gladiator, the sequel follows Lucius (Paul Mescal), the son of Maximus and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, reprising her position). Lucilla secretly despatched the younger Lucius away to the dominion of Numidia for his safety after Maximus’s loss of life. Within the years since, loads has occurred, which we study by way of overly ornate flashbacks and exposition. Lucius has come to resent his homeland and his mom, given their time aside. That resentment grows into rage after Roman forces, led by Lucilla’s new husband, Basic Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), conquer Numidia in a gap battle that results in Lucius’s spouse’s loss of life. In Rome, in the meantime, a pair of snotty brothers named Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) have change into co-emperors. Their reckless management has impressed a resistance led by Lucilla and Acacius, and turned the town into fertile floor for the rise of opportunistic energy gamers similar to Macrinus.
The plot, filled with so many shadowy conspiracies and crafty characters, is way much less simple than the one in Gladiator, to its detriment. However amid the bloat, Scott houses in on how the cycle of ambition and retribution could be laborious to interrupt. Bloodshed is the trigger and impact of each twist within the story, the explanation behind Rome’s tumult and the obvious resolution to its woes. Violence calls for the highlight, and Gladiator II attracts rigidity from the truth that lots of its characters can’t escape their attraction to brutality. In Scott’s palms, historical Rome has by no means been extra ruthless—or extra exhilarating to observe.
The director is a grasp at pulling class out of rough-and-tumble set items. In the course of the assault on Lucius’s residence, embers swirl like snow, flecks of water and dust smack into the digital camera lens, and each strike of a sword or blow of a fist lands with primal depth. Contained in the Colosseum, regardless of the noticeably heavy use of CGI, Scott finds putting pictures within the chaos: A pool of blood blossoms underwater. An arrow zips throughout the sphere. A gladiator tosses sand into the air. These pictures are mesmerizing for the viewer, and convey the unusual attract of battle for the combatants themselves.
These energetic battle scenes are matched by a group of flashy performances, with these enjoying the villains stealing the present. Mescal and Pascal embody their roles’ gravitas and change into nearly feral once they’re compelled into the Colosseum. However Quinn and Hechinger have far more enjoyable leaning into their characters’ boyish petulance, echoing Joaquin Phoenix’s work because the man-child emperor, Commodus, from Gladiator. Washington, nevertheless, runs away with the film: Armed with a Cheshire-cat grin, heaps of knickknack, and seemingly limitless glasses of wine, Macrinus toys with Rome prefer it’s an enormous chessboard stuffed with pawns, and the actor embraces the script’s quite a few swerves. He imbues the character with an infectious glee in each scene, whether or not he’s cheering on the boys slicing each other down inside the world or quietly trying to govern Lucius into doing his bidding.
For all of the enjoyable it’s having, Gladiator II does require a working information of its predecessor’s story to grasp the stakes, which additionally means it magnifies the unique movie’s flaws. The characters are extra thinly drawn, with shallow motivations despite the plot’s contrivances. The dialogue is extra stilted, filled with pat observations concerning the “dream of Rome” within the face of an empire that repeatedly fails to study its lesson. And the ending places forth the obscure notion that Rome’s future depends on unifying its folks—an earnest sentiment, perhaps, however a slightly boring conclusion to succeed in after two hours of savagery.
Then once more, Gladiator II doesn’t declare to supply something greater than pure spectacle. The finale gestures at the concept hope is its personal type of energy, however even Lucius admits to its limits as a peacekeeping drive. “You look to me to talk,” Lucius says as he addresses opposing armies about to battle. “I do know not what to say.” Possibly Macrinus, who believes that Rome is doomed to brutality and bloodshed, has a degree when he asserts that violence is “the common language.” In any case, to borrow a revered gladiator’s phrases, it’s undeniably entertaining.
