The ever-expanding Roman empire is on the brink of disorder being led by the inept and infantile twin emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger).  When General Acacius (Pedro Pascal) returns to the city with a ship full of slaves after conquering a North African territory, the emperors organize a days-long event of games to be held in the Colosseum in his honor.  One of those slaves, Lucius (Paul Mescal), has been sold into the service of Macrinus (Denzel Washington) and proves to be an adept fighter.  Macrinus, with plans of power of his own, strategically wields Lucius’ vendetta against Rome to advance his own agenda at controlling the Senate, and eventually the emperor’s seat, but through fate, the gods’ will, or man’s own will to survive, the seemingly best-laid plans will falter. 

Long in the making – set sixteen years after the events in Gladiator (2000) and released almost a quarter of a century after its predecessor – Ridley Scott returns to ancient Rome with Gladiator II, a 148-minute epic written by David Scarpa.  The highly anticipated film bypassed a festival rollout, instead premiering early in Europe before Paramount Pictures opened the film wide state-side on over 3,500 screens ahead of the holiday frame.  A legacy sequel of sorts with the reprising of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) and Gracchus (Derek Jacobi), the film feels less egregious of a cash grab as some of its contemporaries, but Scarpa’s script does fall into the trap of holding a bit too much of a serialized allegiance to the original while also having to one-up its hallowed predecessor; an ironic reflection of the ravenous needs to of Roman populous. 

Picking up the mantle from Russel Crowe, Mescal makes his most ferocious drive from indie darling to Hollywood leading man.  While his skill in the arena may have captured the attention of the Roman masses, modern audiences from their privileged seats may be less engaged with his still overwhelmingly passive performance.  Mescal works over his characters with surgical precision, mostly working in the realm of deeply affecting drama and here being asked to stretch his range into pseudo-action filmmaking.  He still pines over Lucius’ backstory and motivations with such obsession that even Konstantin Stanislavski would be more than ready to start addressing what is on the page had he been in the director’s seat.  There is nothing wrong with a classically dedicated performance, but when the script does not allow the character to interact with the elements of the contrived backstory, the performance does not always feel appropriate.  This is absolutely the case here with Mescal who portrays Lucius as a rightfully troubled man content to wallow in the past while Scarpa is pushing him forward into what ultimately plays out like an awkward – and frankly unearned – triumph. 

As an action hero, Mescal fares well enough in the various sequences but is saddled with fighting off a menagerie of CGI beasts ranging from a troop of baboons, to a steered rhinoceros and finally, the much-ridiculed sharks in a recreation of a naval battle in the flooded Colosseum.  He performs well in the fights and even up against the animals he can hold his own, but he is let down by the script needing to present something new, that it becomes too big to be believable.  Lucius hops around the sandy arena with the impenetrable plot armor in addition to his leather and iron cladding that holds back some of the excitement in the hand-to-hand melee, but his brooding pays off in the slower moments when we await the emporer’s discretion on whether or not to spare his advisories. 

Much of the action of the film is rooted in spectacle, not unlike Gladiator, but expanded on in a way that sits strangely with audiences.  There is no denying that Scott has pulled out many of the stops here, and these moments are exciting but as the camera pulls wide and we see the naval battle in the closed bowl of the Colosseum, it feels strange, almost stunted, as when compared to the siege that opened the film, we now are working within clear and concrete borders.  Beyond watching a representation of a representation – of a representation? – the closed quarters does little to inspire, especially when just one year ago over the same frame, audiences followed Scott along as he chronicled the Napoleonic campaign across Europe.  The spectacle and the plot do not integrate as well here as we would like so it feels very much like two separate films being spliced together more than a uniform piece.  This is a step up from the original which does lean heavily into the action set pieces that tie the story together, but here the action simply builds upon itself in scale without too much connective tissue while the plot simmers away in the background. 

Thankfully, the film contains a good bit of palace intrigue that is endlessly engaging courtesy of Washington’s steal-the-scene performance.  He is working with big, bold strokes that could, for one not on the same page as him, find overacting and overly flamboyant, but this charged energy is exactly what the film needs in the slowed-down sequences next to Mescal’s meter and Pascal’s stripped down role.  The twin emperors are also reading from Washington’s playbook, bringing a welcome flair to the film, also bringing on the absurdity and playing imbecilic foils to each other. 

Despite all of this, the film feels empty, almost hollow.  There is a vengeance arc that loosely frames the action, but Scott seems unfocused and almost frantic; a quality of the pacing that is well hidden given the stately production design, but is ever apparent when reconciling with the events after the credits roll.  It lacks an edge and a voice that would help to keep all of these characters working towards the same overall narrative goals of the film while still allowing them to veer off in their varied performance style.  The result is a film that gives off the aires of being epic in scope, but is more a result of doing as much as possible to fill the runtime.  Individually, there are many interesting and unique things happening, and like a three-ring circus, there is something for everyone, but it is so big and so broad that it is hard to focus in on any one thing because there is no overarching theme. We may not be intended to follow Macrinus, but he wrestles control of the narrative and we follow the events through his lens more so than the anointed Lucius.

Now, to be fair, Scarpa is trying to unify the narrative through Lucis’ lineage as the son of Maximus and Lucilla.  This serialization is wholly unnecessary, opening the “franchise” up to a bit of a Skywalker Problem in that despite having a world of narrative opportunity, filmmakers find themselves adhering to a single family, stunting the growth of the story on the page.  Instead of letting the grandeur of the Colosseum be the unifying thread, Scarpa returns to the well of Maximus, extending a perfectly concise story into something more contrived, asking it to support weight which it was never intended to and consequently crumbles underneath.  Another reflection on the sequel trilogy of Star Wars is the first half of GladiatorII is similar to The Force Awakens (2015), in that it is following in the same structural footprints of what came before it; instead of a star killer super weapon, here we follow a slave skilled in combat who endears himself to people in power.  At a certain point, when resurrecting a property as hallowed as Gladiator, all the choices make sense given the current marketplace and audience’s appetite for serialized stories, but despite the wild animals and nefarious politics, the film feels far too safe.  When what is delivered is put up against something as audacious as Nick Cave’s original sequel idea which found Maximus returning to the world of the living, charged by the Roman Gods to squash out the rising Christian movement that has been converting the Roman people, culminating in influencing the crucifixion of Christ, thus setting in to motion the human history of war, this soapy drama fails to inspire. 

Through all of this, though, Gladiator II is still another valiant effort from this late-career chapter of Scott’s career and impressive in its own right.  Though John Mathieson, his cinematographer, has accused the director of being lazy in his multi-camera setups, that he is able to produce these large-scale, period epics at the speed of which he is delivering them is nothing short of incredible.  Each one has its own visual identity, but whereas The Last Deul (2021), House of Gucci (2021), and Napoleon (2023) were all stand-alone works that could define themselves in what they wanted to be, Gladiator II is tied to the sandy hues of the early 2000’s epic, itself tied to the archaic swords and sandals drama.  With Denis Villeneuve already delivering a gorgeously realized desert planet in Dune: Part 2 (2024), the colors here do feel a little too dusty and stale, so while it is unlikely that this second outing will bring this style of epic filmmaking back into vogue, there is no denying that Scott is still operating at the top of his game, delivering blockbuster films with auteur intentions.