Gladiator took the world by storm that summer of 2000, and while Ridley Scott didn’t win Best Director at the Oscars that year, the film won Best Picture and Best Actor for its star Russell Crowe. A sequel was being tossed around almost immediately, even though Crowe’s character, Maximus, died at the end of the first film.
Still, IP is going to IP, and for years afterward, Scott had claimed a sequel was in the works. Even though the rights changed hands over the decades, we are at last to it – Gladiator II picks up almost two decades since the original film ended, and Marcus Aurelius’ (Richard Harris) dreams of Rome are a distant memory.
Instead, Rome is ruled by two Emperors, twin brothers Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), two venal men who only want power and glory for themselves, while the masses of Rome starve, and the Senate remains weak. Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) can only watch as the Empire falls further into decay, and although she is married to Rome’s general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), both remember a time when Rome was greater than this.
But when Acacius and the armies of Rome attack the land of Numidia on the Caesars’ orders, a chain of events begins that will shake an empire. For in Numidia lives a Roman in exile, one with a mysterious past, and when his wife is killed in the Roman attack, and he is sold into slavery, Lucius (Paul Mescal) must fight in the Colosseum as a gladiator owned by slaver and arms dealer Macrinus (Denzel Washington).
It doesn’t take a math expert to figure out just who Lucius is. Gladiator II relies on the audience remembering the first film, so if you think a revisit might be in order, you should go with that inclination. Crowe’s Maximus, while only appearing in flashback, hangs over much of Gladiator II, and it doesn’t take much of a push to fall back into that world.
As in Gladiator, those hoping for historical accuracy will be sorely disappointed. Ridley Scott has no interest in reenacting old stories, although the script from David Scarpa has no problem borrowing piecemeal from history.
Gladiator, for all the prestige it received come awards time, came from a long tradition of sword-and-sandal cinema. Gladiator II is even more pulpy and melodramatic than the first. That’s not a knock. There are moments in Gladiator II that are deeply silly, but know that the movie is laughing at its own ridiculousness right alongside you.
One set piece in the Colosseum involved flooding the arena and using battleships to re-enact ancient naval battles. Now, I am fully aware that this was an actual thing in ancient Rome, but I highly doubt that the water was full of deadly sharks or that the ships moved across the arena as if on the open ocean, as they do here.
Ridley Scott has no interest in historical accuracy or even logic. He just wants to show us something he thinks is cool. And honestly? I’m down with that. Ridley Scott is near 90, showing no signs of slowing down, and seems to not give a single care about what others think.
That’s a filmmaker we want to encourage, especially in this staid, safe cinematic environment we find ourselves in these days. If Scott must create in these genres and with these IPs to continue to work, then let the man play, and damn the torpedoes.
If the movie is in on the joke, so are the actors, especially one who I’ll get to in a moment. Paul Mescal (Aftersun) plays the heroic Lucius, burdened with a past and a purpose, and while Mescal doesn’t have the charisma of Russell Crowe, Lucius’ journey from slave to gladiator to hero is well orchestrated.
Pedro Pascal‘s conflicted Acacius knows that he serves lesser masters. He plots with Connie Nielsen‘s Lucilla to bring back a more civilized Rome, and Pascal brings his charm and substantial movie-star power to the part. It’s a pleasure to see Connie Nielsen again, playing the granddaughter of Marcus Aurelius and striving to bring back his dreams of Rome.
The performances of Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger are over-the-top and crossing the border into camp, but one could argue that it’s appropriate to those characters, and when the movie gets silly, it’s mostly due to their work. Still, they make for intriguing villains, but if they were the only villains, the film would fail on the backs of these characters.
Fortunately, we have one Denzel Washington, who is incredible here and reminds us all why he is one of our greatest actors. He embraces the absurdity of the film and this character but also elevates the film. It would be reductive to say that he steals the movie because he owns the movie. When he’s offscreen, you miss him.
Macrinus is full of righteous rage, a need to seed chaos and disorder into Rome, to watch it all burn for his pleasure, and Washington is having so much fun, wearing opulent robes and twisting the knife into everyone he sees, that I can imagine Scott and Washington gleefully planning every scene and laughing about what would happen next.
Awards talk is justified here – this is the kind of part that Hollywood gives out every few years to remind us that when we let a great actor like Denzel Washington play, we all benefit from those rewards. He’s practically his own special effect.
Ridley Scott is more than a director – at this stage of his career, he’s a brand. There are very few directors out there these days who can claim that, and at least Scott is using it to his advantage, continuing to make compelling cinema and thumbing his nose at established Hollywood just because he can. His efforts may not always succeed – I’m still not the biggest fan of what he’s been doing with the newer Alien films, but I would be the first to be in line for the next one, and I cannot deny that those movies are absolutely the story he wanted to tell.
It’s getting rarer these days that studios let artists like Ridley Scott have carte blanche, if those movies deliver at the box office, so we must celebrate it when auteurs like Scott are given free rein. Gladiator II may lack the elegance of the first, but it is fully Ridley Scott’s vision, and that is to be respected. Come for the sweeping storytelling; stay for Denzel Washington’s gleefully anarchic performance.
GLADIATOR II REVIEW RATING: 8 OUT OF 10
Paramount Pictures will release Gladiator II in theaters on Friday, November 22, 2024. The film has been rated R for strong bloody violence.
Alan Cerny has been writing about film for more than 20 years for such sites as Ain’t It Cool News, CHUD, Birth Movies Death, and ComingSoon. He has been a member of the Houston Film Critics Society since 2011. STAR WARS biased. Steven Spielberg once called Alan a “very good writer,” and Alan has the signed letter to prove it, so it must be true.