Gladiator II (Scott, 2024)
“Yay, team good guys, I guess,” said my friend Max while leaving the theater and succinctly expressing my own ambivalence toward Ridley Scott’s dull, plodding, and completely unnecessary sequel.
There was not a single place where I thought the film approached, much less matched, its predecessor. The characters were less interesting, their conflicts were vocalized mostly in the form of exposition and slogans. Mescal’s Lucius had none of the gravitas that Crowe brought to his star-making role. The corrupt emperor twins had twice the camp (or is it two squared?) and half the menace as Joaquin Phoenix’s villain. If I hadn’t seen Derek Jacobi’s name in the credits I doubt I would have noticed him in the film. Connie Nielsen gets to cry a little louder than last time while holding out for a hero ’til the end of the night.
In terms of cinematography, we get tighter framing and dimmer lighting. In terms of spectacle, we get some rabid monkeys instead of tigers and some fake-looking CGI sharks to punctuate a lot of fisticuffs shot with tight framing to keep costs down. Perhaps because Lucius is initially driven by misdirected fury, the emotional stakes never quite seem real. Whatever political commentary might be implied and applied to historical or current events is delivered in spoonfed slogans rather than principled speeches. (It doesn’t help that “What we do in life echoes in eternity” is, like so many other parts of the first film, parrotted out-of-context in an attempt to elicit nostalgia for the past rather than establish continuity with it.)
Gladiator did win a Best Picture from the Academy, so I suppose some might argue that comparisons are an unfair bar to expect a sequel to clear. But aren’t all sequels inviting comparisons to their predecessors? My complaint isn’t so much that this one doesn’t reach the same heights as the first but that the drop-off is so steep, it signals a lack of ambition that comes across as almost cynical. Is this a movie that anyone wanted? I don’t just mean the audience. Was it a part of the story that Scott felt was left untold? Did Denzel Washington see one of those YouTube videos about best directors to never win an Oscar and think, “Hey, let’s see if we can do something about that?” Or did Paramount just make so much money from Top Gun: Maverick that they started looking for other past successes they could remake and couldn’t sell James Cameron on the idea of Titanic 2?
