By Dalton Johnson
@_daltonsmoviethoughts
Is there a Latin version of “Groundhog Day”? Once upon a time (24 YEARS) Russell Crowe (Les Miserables, A Beautiful Mind) whose noble hero Maximus in Sir Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sandal classic GLADIATOR was the honest soldier outside the snickering metropolitan elite, out to gain vengeance and redeem Roman honor in the blood-spattered arena, his raw courage exposing the politicians’ contemptible decadence. Maximus defiant and now iconic “Are you not entertained?” spoke to the showbiz-political complex of our own time. When it was alleged last year that most men thought about the Roman Empire daily suspicion was that what they were actually thinking about was … that film.
24 years and little has changed, in fact really nothing. This sequel is incredibly watchable and spectacular (also known as a Ridley Scott movie), with the Colosseum rendered as a jaw-dropping 1-to-1 scale physical reconstruction (done in Malta) with real crowds. This film is nearly a remake, essentially refreshing almost every single narrative component of the original in a form that also for more, the events of the first film echoing in franchise eternity.
For this person, its existence (Gladiator II) could alter the original film’s innocence. Maximus was famously devoted to the memory of his murdered wife and son (He had a speech about it) though it seemed as if there had once been some emotional history, before his marriage, between him and the emperor’s daughter Lucilla returning to the role Connie Nielsen (Wonder Woman, One Hour Photo), who has a boy of her own. Well, that boy turns out to have been Maximus’ son. This is not a spoiler it’s featured heavily in the marketing campaign as odd as that may seem. Who knew?
Definitely! Not me or least of all Maximus!
At 28, Paul Mescal (All Of Us Strangers, Aftersun) is younger than Crowe’s 36 when he took the lead in GLADIATOR, but Mescal physically put in the work and it shows on screen the dude is jacked but in a believable way with a new sonorous growl that candidly I did not know he had in him: charismatic and likable in the ways Mescal always is. He is young Lucius, who as a child (Gladiator Spencer Treat Clarke) made a chaotic escape from the cesspool that Rome had become and is grown to adulthood in separatist Africa Nova territory.
He now faces being conquered by the brutal cruelty of the Roman empire; he is a soldier and his wife Arishat portrayed by Yuval Gonen (The Station, Dance Story) is no simpering damsel but a warrior also. There is no mention of a child but I have a feeling we might in years to come find out about a son hidden away from the danger of battle.
I will watch that movie as well by the way. The Romans’ tough, honest general Marcus Acacius performed by Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us, The Mandalorian) does his duty again brutally but respects the Africans’ martial honor/bravery and has no interest in decadent Roman politicians; he is effectively the new version of Maximus battling the Teutons.
Lucius is captured (sound familiar), sold into slavery (sound familiar), and … yes … becomes a gladiator just like Dad, here through his relentlessness in combat (Great fight choreography) and impressing his owners with an ability to quote Virgil. And just like his dad he confronts the lisping, sneering, sadistic, fey ruling class like Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus – this time it’s a two-headed snake: the co-emperors Geta played by Joseph Quinn (The Quiet Place: Day One, Stranger Things) and Caracalla brought to the screen Fred Hechinger (Thelma, News of the World), each in incredible period accurate level eyeliner and sinister tastes in entertainment.
As the Slave-owner and slave-trainer, Denzel Washington (Training Day, The Equalizer) inherits Oliver Reed’s role who passed away famously during the first film’s shooting process. Washington plays the cunning and ambitious Macrinus, who plans to parlay his warlord status into political power, a Roman Yevgeny Prigozhin.
In fact, Washington almost steals the entire picture as Macrinus shrewdly exploits the gambling addiction of Tim McInnerny (Notting Hill, Game of Thrones) who is a weak and duplicitous Senator Thraex. It is Washington who I can say here and now is worth the price of admission alone, you all are not prepared for the gifs and memes his character has. And as Lucius becomes a new insurgent superstar in this world of bread-and-circuses, a plot is hatched between Lucilla and Marcus Acacius to do away with the evil (Quinn has had a great year in the film he continues here and Fred is disturbing but you have to laugh or else)Geta and Caracalla and reinstate the Republic.
It is impossible to avoid the brilliant deja vu that cinema provides. Nielsen’s Lucilla is the one female in the film with the agency; she has a difficult, unspoken relationship with our hero, just as she was in “Gladiator”, but which here creates a weirdly Oedipal energy. Lucius maybe comes close in his emotional confusion to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and Lucilla’s own scene in the gladiatorial arena has something almost sexual in it – though it’s probably not worthwhile to start finding sexual aspects to a story whose costumes are all sex-positive.
This is a sequel that isn’t afraid to get its hands dirty – it delivers the keynote scenes and moments for the fanbase (which is all of us) and the all-important gladiator setpieces have the right hallucinatory quality, as a sea battle is re-enacted in the flooded arena or a vast rhino gets its scaly backside kicked. When Lucius has to fight vicious baboons in one scene, it almost looks as though we’ve entered Sir Ridley’s ALIEN universe.
Sir 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 something is awe-inspiring in seeing Mescal’s triumphal march into the A-list.
