NATHAN WEINBENDER:
Ridley Scott’s career has always been all over the place, but in the last half decade, his work has latched onto a unifying theme. He’s made a string of period pieces about fallen ambition: the aggrieved family dynasties in All the Money in the World and House of Gucci, the twilight years of the once-great general in Napoleon, the codes of chivalry disgraced by the medieval knights of The Last Duel.
And here we have the Roman Empire on the brink of collapse in Gladiator II, the long-delayed sequel to Scott’s best picture-winning 2000 film. Like those earlier films, this one isn’t entirely successful, but it has flashes of endearing eccentricity and borderline camp that occasionally spark it to life. It’s a bit weirder than the first film, which was sturdily constructed and proudly old-fashioned, a musty old sword-and-sandal drama with the blood and gore quotient ramped up for 21st-century audiences. Were we not entertained?
Gladiator II doesn’t deviate from the first film’s formula. In fact, it doubles down on it. Again we get the powerful warrior with a tragic past who is finally conquered in battle, sold into slavery and thrown into the arena as a gladiator. Instead of one bloodthirsty boy emperor presiding over the arena, we get two of them. And there are more flashes to the afterlife here, but the golden glow of the first film has been replaced with shimmering black-and-white visions that recall Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
Paul Mescal stars as Lucius, a formidable warrior who, unbeknownst to everyone, is actually the grandson of the great Marcus Aurelius. Having lost his wife and his army to Roman troops, Lucius is taken from the kingdom of Numidia to the Eternal City and almost instantly becomes the star attraction of the gladiator battles.
The plot amounts to breathless palace intrigue. The brother emperors (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger) are under the thumb of the scheming Macrinus (Denzel Washington), who sees them as disposable stepping stones to his own reign. Meanwhile, the heroic general Acacius (Pedro Pascal), who led the troops that captured Lucius and killed his wife, is conspiring to topple the emperors with Lucius’ mother Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), who intones that they must prevent the empire from drowning in its own blood.
Everyone speaks in portentous bromides like that, including Lucius, who also liberally quotes Virgil. He fights dirty, but he also fights smart, whether he’s going paw-to-toe with a feral baboon or grabbing onto men twice his size and crashing them through stone tables like they’re in a WWE match. The gladiator sequences in this movie are a bit insane: After the baboons, Lucius must take down a guy on the back of a charging rhino, and later some sharks, which have been dropped into the Coliseum after it has been miraculously filled with water.
I suppose stories like this will be relevant as long as there are civilizations in jeopardy to the whims of megalomaniacs, and bankable as long as moviegoers are as thrilled by carnage as those roiling throngs of ancient Romans. It’s too bad that the screenplay is a retread of a retread, and it could have used more of the gonzo energy that Denzel Washington brings. He’s the Iago of this particular tragedy, and he so rarely plays villains that you forget he’s really good at it. He is really the sole fresh element in Gladiator II, which is handsomely made but has stretches that feel like trudges.
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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.
