By Erin Free
Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, Connie Nielsen, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger
Intro:
...big screen entertainment of the first order...
Up until, well, just about now, the very idea of a sequel to 2000’s Gladiator would have been, well, ludicrous. But with the wholesale plundering of the dusty war chest stamped “Existing IP” (see the surprisingly effective and enjoyable cinematic corpse resuscitation of the likes of Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters, Blade Runner, and all the rest) now pretty much de rigeur, the return to Sir Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sandals world is no more shocking than the re-emergence of all the other “legacy sequels”…though it certainly comes with a little more anticipation. A sequel to the 2000 Best Film Oscar winner has long been mooted, with a bizarro script even penned by the great Nick Cave (click right here for more on that). The climactic death of Russell Crowe’s central hero, however, has always made the approach to a Gladiator sequel somewhat problematic. 24 years later, with Rusty’s tiger-fighting days likely behind him (except when it comes to watching his team on the footy field), it feels like a safe time for this high-spectacle return to the bloody, brutal world of Ancient Rome.
Many, many years after the insurrection and tragic death of gladiatorial hero Maximus, we meet a new hard-man in the form of…don’t worry, the “secret” seems to have been wildly blown via IMDB and various other reviews…Maximus’ son, Lucius. In a move that has likely had actor Spencer Treat Clark (TV’s Animal Kingdom, Glass, Unbreakable) quietly fuming, the child role of Gladiator’s Lucius has been prised from him and instead gifted to British Oscar nominee Paul Mescal (Aftersun, Foe, Carmen), who makes a quite extraordinary fist of this heavy-weighs-the-head part, which will likely now make him a legit and very well-deserved movie star. Mescal offers gravitas, charisma, muscularity, sensitivity and bruising bravado in droves as his hard-fighting warrior is dragged from his home in Africa and sold into gladiatorial slavery in the colosseum.
Quickly proving his mettle against other gladiatorial brutes and even a horde of absolutely dreadfully wrought CGI baboons, Lucius catches the eye of power player and slave trader Macrinus (Denzel Washington has so much fun hamming it up and playing it injudiciously to the very back rows here that one seriously hopes he donated his likely enormous pay cheque to charity), who embroils the young warrior in a sneaky plot to unseat Rome’s creepy sibling emperors Geta and Caracalla (the excellently malevolent Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger), who seem to have sauntered in off the set of Tinto Brass’s Caligula. The former emperor’s daughter Lucilla (a very welcome return from the elegant, composed and instantly empathetic Connie Nielsen) is there in the background, while her inherently decent Roman general husband Marcus Acacius (winningly essayed by hardest-working-man-in-showbusiness Pedro Pascal, who literally must have cloned himself in order to appear in so many movies and TV shows) has unfortunately been placed in the sights of Lucius for killing his warrior wife in battle. The stage is indeed set for a battle of epic proportions…and for Lucius’ bloody rise.
At the risk of committing cinematic sacrilege, Ridley Scott’s original Gladiator was no great work of art. It was a big, epic, self-important film prone to silliness and over reach…yes, it was very good, but great? Not quite. Gladiator II trots exactly the same sandal-run race here, boasting big, engaging, broadly drawn characters that you can latch easily onto, and moments of exciting spectacle. That said, and at the risk of getting all grumpy-old-man, this is not exactly Ben-Hur; there’s something decidedly less thrilling about watching a fleet of cartoon-like Roman warships roaring across a CGI ocean than there is upon seeing the kinda sorta real thing as evinced in the packed-with-real-human-extras epics of old like Cleopatra and El Cid. Ridley Scott, however, is a filmmaker of prodigious gifts, and he still has the goods to make Gladiator II absolutely exciting and bolted-to-your-chair thrilling, even over its rather inflated run-time.
The director is aided immeasurably by David Scarpa’s script, which is ambitious and bold and filled with rich, entertainingly plummy dialogue. It bows somewhat to the altar of the original film without withering in its thrall, which marks a sensible approach indeed. Like many other Rome-set epics, however, Gladiator II does give off a slightly uncomfortable whiff of homophobia, with the film’s various villains’ nastiness seemingly sought to be punched up by having them effuse a broad air of leering campiness. It’s certainly there in the creepy brother emperors, along with Tim McInnerny’s degenerate gambler and Denzel conspirator Thraex, and even in Matt Lucas’ grandiose primping colosseum MC. In Gladiator II, machismo certainly rules.
There is much to recommend the unashamedly fun and entertaining Gladiator II, but just as it was with Rusty and the original Gladiator, Sir Ridley’s pick of leading man is the real masterstroke. Even when playing against heavy hitters like Washington, Pascal, and even Derek Jacobi (who returns from the first film), Paul Mescal brilliantly holds his own, expertly holding the audience’s gaze with his quietly simmering presence, not faltering for one single second while the acrobatically theatrical and utterly shameless Denzel Washington attempts to steal every scene out from under him. It’s a terrific performance, and Mescal (especially in his scenes with the excellent Connie Nielsen) gives the wide-canvas madness of Gladiator II the rock-hard kernel of emotion and meaning that it so desperately needs. It’s big screen entertainment of the first order, and right now, that makes for something truly and profoundly satisfying.
