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Back in June, Russell Crowe told a US podcast that he felt “slightly uncomfortable” with the idea of a sequel to Gladiator in which he doesn’t feature. “A couple of things that I’ve heard, I’m like, ‘No, no, no, that’s not in the moral journey of that particular character,’” he explained.
You can understand the apprehension. Just think of how imperious Crowe was in Ridley Scott’s swords-and-sandals classic, all grizzled, gravel-voiced machismo as the soldier who becomes a slave who becomes the saviour of Rome. It was a triumphant performance in a film that had everything. Betrayal! Beheadings! The Colosseum! A monologue I can definitely not recite word for word! And of course the whole thing was carried off with such chutzpah that you could let slide some of its more portentous posturing. My word were we entertained.
If only one could say the same for the sequel. For a film that took what seems like centuries to get made, Scott’s Gladiator II feels weirdly rushed, a gallimaufry of half-baked ideas and lazy throwbacks to the Crowe original from 2000. And yet critics, by and large, have loved it. The Guardian called it “gobsmacking”. “Relentlessly entertaining,” wrote The Daily Telegraph, while The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey said: “Gladiator II shows us how to make cinema with a capital C.” Far be it from me to disregard their opinions, but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed. Terribly vexed, even.
For a start, David Scarpa’s screenplay tramples all over the earlier film’s legacy like a heavy-footed Roman legion, as Crowe feared it would. Take its hero, Lucius (Paul Mescal), the nephew of the original’s creepy Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) and grandson of the idealistic Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris). Now we know that Crowe’s Maximus was an uxorious man; the memory of his murdered wife and son is what sustained him. But this new film does the dirty on the former general, revealing that Lucius is his illegitimate son, the result of his love affair with Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla. Maximus, you rogue.
The story itself is not so much a march onwards as a retracing of steps. In many respects, it’s a remake. Just as Maximus sought vengeance for his family, so Lucius wants revenge on Rome, the city that sent him into exile in north Africa as a child, before killing his wife, making him a slave and forcing him to compete in a gladiatorial festival in the Colosseum. Sound familiar? Only this time our hero has a knack for quoting Virgil. Even the set pieces echo those of the original: the film opens with a big battle scene, then transplants the action to an amphitheatre on the outskirts of Rome before a gauntlet of showdowns at the Colosseum. Of these, the most offensive is also the most historically dubious, as the arena is filled with water and a hungry shiver of shonky CGI sharks join the fray, straight from the animated soup of Deep Blue Sea.
Of course a sense of deja vu does not necessarily a bad film make. After all, Star Wars: The Force Awakens was very similar to A New Hope yet was still thrilling. But here, hobbled by a script that expects him to lend weighty heft to lines that only sound plausible when growled by Crowe, such as “Strength and honour”, the normally brilliant Mescal is reduced to a dull cipher. His impassioned monologue towards the end is painfully reminiscent of Orlando Bloom’s in Scott’s 2005 Crusader epic, Kingdom of Heaven. Spare a thought, too, for Derek Jacobi, back as Senator Gracchus. Having imbued the first film with some I, Claudius-style gravitas, here he is brought back purely to remind everyone of the solemnity of having Marcus Aurelius’s trust, before being unceremoniously sidelined and then discarded.
As for the villains: I couldn’t stand Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger’s deranged co-emperors Geta and Caracalla, with their ticks and Sunday-comedown jitteriness, but Denzel Washington, as a slave-owner with soaring ambitions, is deliciously sly, stealing every scene and generally putting all the actors to shame. He’s the film’s only real winner, apart perhaps from Caracalla’s pet monkey, who lights up the screen.
Indeed, where Gladiator felt epic in scope, its characters carefully formed, this sequel wryly gallops towards its finale, playing fast and loose with a script that cares not about concealing glaring plot holes. Speaking in Los Angeles recently, Nielsen discussed the haste with which the film was made: “This time around, what would have taken three hours to set up 25 years ago now takes 20 minutes,” she said. “We could not believe how fast we were moving.”
It shows. Scene by scene, Gladiator II just feels… undercooked. There’s no panache, no bombast, no indelible lines. It’s as if Scott blearily knocked it out and never looked back, content to rest on his laurels. Not that the 86-year-old’s recent output has been that different. Look at the much-ridiculed House of Gucci (2021), for instance. In terms of its camerawork, it was staid and unflashy, which, for a film that seemed dazzling and flamboyant on the page, was bewildering. Maybe the fact that Scott speed-filmed an entire performance by Christopher Plummer into All the Money in the World (2017) after Kevin Spacey was cut from it has made him think it’s possible to hurry entire productions.
When Gladiator premiered in May 2000, it successfully revived an ailing, outdated genre, one that had been brutally spoofed in Airplane! and Monty Python. This sequel feels like a backwards step; I bet Crowe is fuming. As Maximus famously said: “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” He surely wasn’t expecting accompanying laughter.
‘Gladiator II’ is in cinemas
