Review Roundup: Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II
Soon after its release in May of 2000, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator became one of the year’s biggest movies thanks to its epic scope and spectacle wedded with Russell Crowe’s compelling performance as Maximus Decimus Meridius, a dishonored Roman general seeking to avenge his family’s death. In addition to being 2000’s second highest-grossing film, Gladiator won numerous awards including Oscars for “Best Picture” and “Best Actor.” It’s now widely considered one of the best films of the ’00s and Crowe’s Maximus one of the great movie characters.
Development of a sequel began soon after, in 2001, and in the years to come, numerous writers would tackle the script. (At one point, Nick Cave wrote a script that found Maximus resurrected by the Roman gods and tasked with wiping out Christianity, only to be doomed to live forever and fight in the Crusades, World War II, and the Vietnam War. Which might just be the most Nick Cave thing ever.)
The sequel stalled in 2006 even as Scott continued to toy with ideas, and in 2021, he announced that David Scarpa — who wrote 2023’s Napoleon for Scott — was working on a Gladiator II script. Production finally began in 2023, with Irish actor Paul Mescal donning the sword and sandals as Lucius Verus, Maximus Decimus Meridius’ long lost son. Joining him are Pedro Pascal, Connie Nielsen, and Denzel Washington as a former slave who serves as Lucius’ mentor.
With all of this star power, is Gladiator II Ridley Scott’s triumphant return to ancient Rome? Or is it just the latest in a long line of unnecessary sequels for great movies? Read on for a sampling of critics’ reviews and opinions.
The film’s melodrama becomes viscerally exciting once all these cards are on the table, forcing unchecked rage into logistical conundrums about how best to proceed — an all-too-familiar dilemma in the days following the recent presidential election. Can Rome be saved by replacing the people at the top? Or would it best be dealt with by razing it to the ground? Although the film’s conclusions might seem simple and didactic, they’re couched in a pertinent sense of outrage against wealth and authority that grow increasingly callous. It’s hard not to be taken in by such a message, reactionary or otherwise.
Whether intentionally or not, Scott’s latest taps into the zeitgeist at a moment when young men have fallen prey to perverse idols peddling callousness and bigotry as marks of strength. Lucius stands as a leader with a moral compass, who strives for gentleness amid the rage that courses through his veins.
Ridley Scott is one of cinema’s modern marvels with his extraordinary run of high-energy pictures in the last few years delivered at a terrific storytelling gallop: the Rashomon nightmare The Last Duel, the true-crime melodrama House of Gucci, and the excellent and underestimated Napoleon bio-epic. As for Gladiator II, he’s galloping back over old ground, galloping in a circle perhaps. But there is something awe-inspiring in seeing Paul Mescal’s triumphal march into the A-list.
Twenty-four years ago, Gladiator was bracingly old and new at the same time: a hyperviolent literate action movie rooted in the theatrical antiquity of Hollywood’s past and rendered with the (then-novel) VFX of the future. With Gladiator II, we go in knowing more or less what we’re getting, but the film still stands strikingly apart from the blockbuster marketplace. It’s a Saturday-night epic of tony escapism. But is it great? A movie to love the way that some of us love Gladiator? No and no. It’s ultimately a mere shadow of that movie. But it’s just diverting enough to justify its existence.
Gladiator II is equal in scale and spectacle, and weighted with metaphor, but it’s also shot through with the kind of wry, absurdist slant that’s come to dominate Scott’s work of the last decade and a half, from Napoleon to Alien: Covenant. At times, Gladiator II is pure camp. To insist that it shouldn’t be is to hold on too tightly to the dour expectations of the 21st-century blockbuster.
Gladiator II… eventually descends into a series of bloody melees that culminate in a flat advocation for peace, without any deeper meaning. There’s a thread about the powerless taking power that almost feels like something, but never comes together. Instead, this is a movie that could have had so much impact, yet seems unlikely to echo in eternity.
Lacking the novelty of the original film, a throwback to historical epics of old given a modern blockbuster packaging, and absent a hero as compelling as Russell Crowe’s Maximus, the sequel’s sole reason to exist can be found in the title. Remember Gladiator? This is Gladiator, too.
[T]his is a magnificently constructed historical epic that combines blood-spattered spectacle with soap opera melodramatics. Much of the plot feels like we’re retracing the footprints of the original, especially in the early going, and there are a few moments when the CGI looks like one of those slick but cheap AI demonstration videos you see posted on social media, but Gladiator II is a welcome slice of R-rated, popcorn movie fun in the middle of the generally super-serious awards season.
As he demonstrated in the far more uneven Napoleon, Scott is in his element filming massive crowds and blood-soaked battles, the grandiosity accentuated by Harry Gregson-Williams’ high-drama score. Gladiator II might not have a protagonist with the scorching glower of Crowe’s Maximus, but it has plenty of the eye-popping spectacle and operatic violence audiences will want.
The problem with Gladiator 2 isn’t the xenomorph-like design of the giant CGI baboons who are sicced on poor Lucius in the Colosseum; it’s the audience’s sense that we’ve seen much of this before, sometimes quite literally, as scenes from the original movie are revisited in recurring soft-focus flashbacks. Are we not entertained? Well, we were back in 2000.
Much has been made of the scale in this sequel too, particularly the epic Colosseum naval battle featuring a load of sharks, but these setpieces are frustratingly short — there’s a lot of build-up to big moments that are over in a flash. Similarly, tension between characters seems to evaporate all too easily, meaning it’s hard to really see any weight in their words or actions. This, combined with the flimsy conceit that a fundamentally corrupt institution can be changed from the inside out with a few good men, means that Gladiator II lacks both the gravitas and simple but satisfying narrative arc which made its foundation such a refreshing epic.
I didn’t adore Gladiator, but I appreciated the melodramatic conviction at its core, the way it was unabashedly emotional about grief and justice and restoring order to the world. Gladiator II echoes elements from the first film, including talk of the “dream of Rome” as a more egalitarian place, but while that idea is more central to the plot in the sequel, it feels even more abstract. Rome in this film isn’t solid enough to require saving or destruction — it’s a series of historical interiors the characters pass through.
Gladiator II arrives in theaters on November 22, 2024. Watch the trailer below.
