Gladiator 2 is a terrible mess – no wonder it made Russell Crowe uncomfortable

On By Littum

BIn June, Russell Crowe told an American podcast that he felt “a little uncomfortable” with the idea of ​​a sequel to Gladiator where he is not with. “A few things that I’ve heard, I’m like, ‘No, no, no, it’s not in that character’s moral journey,'” he explained.

You can understand the fear. Just think how imperious Crowe was in Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sandals classic, all gritty, gravel-voiced machismo as the soldier-turned-slave-turned-savior of Rome. It was a triumphant performance in a film that had it all. Treason! Beheadings! Colosseum! A monologue I absolutely cannot recite word for word! And of course it was all carried off with such chutzpah that you could let some of its more portentous posturing slide. My word was that we entertained.

If only the same could be said for the sequel. For a film that took what seems like centuries to make, Scott’s Gladiator II feels strangely rushed, a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas and lazy throwbacks to the Crowe original from 2000. And yet, critics have largely loved it. The Guardian called it “nonsense”. “Relentlessly entertaining,” wrote Daily Telegraphwhile The independentClarisse 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 but feel disappointed. Terribly annoyed, even.

For starters, David Scarpa’s script stomps over the previous film’s legacy like a heavy-footed Roman legion that Crowe feared. Take its hero, Lucius (Paul Mescal), the nephew of the original’s sinister Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) and grandson of the idealistic Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris). Now we know that Crowe’s Maximus was a sinister man; the memory of his murdered wife and son is what kept him up. 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 scoundrel.

The story itself is not so much an advance as a retreat of steps. In many ways, it’s a remake. Just as Maximus sought revenge for his family, Lucius seeks revenge on Rome, the city that exiled him to North Africa as a child before killing his wife, enslaving him, and forcing him to compete in a gladiator festival at the Colosseum. Does that sound familiar? Only this time our hero has a knack for quoting Virgil. Even the sets mirror those of the original: the film opens with a big fight scene, then the action is transplanted to an amphitheater on the outskirts of Rome before a cloak of showdown at the Colosseum. Of these, the most offensive is also the most historically questionable, as the arena is filled with water and a hungry smorgasbord of sleek CGI sharks join the fray straight from the animated soup of Deep Blue Sea.

Of course, a sense of deja vu doesn’t necessarily make a bad movie. After all, Star Wars: The Force Awakens was very similar A new hope was still exciting though. But here, hobbled by a script that expects him to deliver lines that only sound plausible when growled by Crowe, such as “Strength and honor,” 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, The kingdom of heaven. Also spare a thought for Derek Jacobi, back as Senator Gracchus. After imprinting the first film with some I, Claudius-style gravitas, here he is brought back solely to remind everyone of the solemnity of having the trust of Marcus Aurelius, before being unceremoniously sidelined and then discarded.

Rotten Roman: Paul Mescal in Ridley Scott's 'Gladiator II'

Rotten Roman: Paul Mescal in Ridley Scott’s ‘Gladiator II’ (Cuba Scott)

As for the villains: I couldn’t stand Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger’s insane co-emperors Geta and Caracalla, with their ticks and Sunday comedown nervousness, but Denzel Washington, as a slave owner with soaring ambitions, is deliciously sly, stealing every scene and generally making everyone actors to shame. He’s the film’s only real winner, apart perhaps from Caracalla’s pet monkey, who lights up the screen.

Actually where Gladiator felt epic in scope, its characters carefully shaped, this sequel gallops lopsidedly toward its finale, playing fast and loose with a script that doesn’t worry about hiding glaring plot holes. Speaking in Los Angeles recently, Nielsen discussed the haste with which the film was made: “This time, what would have taken three hours to set up 25 years ago now takes 20 minutes,” she said. “We couldn’t believe how fast we were moving.”

It shows. Scene by scene, Gladiator II just feels… undercooked. There is no panache, no bombast, no indelible lines. It’s as if Scott blurted it out and never looked back, content to rest on his laurels. Not that the 86-year-old’s recent output has been all that different. Look at the very ridiculous House of Gucci (2021), for example. As for its camerawork, it was stiff and nondescript, which for a film that appeared dazzling and flamboyant on the page, was confusing. Maybe the fact that Scott speed-filmed an entire performance by Christopher Plummer All the money in the world (2017), after Kevin Spacey was cut from it, has led him to believe that it is possible to rush entire productions.

A Little Much: Joseph Quinn in 'Gladiator II'

A Little Much: Joseph Quinn in ‘Gladiator II’ (Cuba Scott)

However, that doesn’t explain it Gladiator II‘s tone. Yes, the swords-and-scandals genre is ripe for campy parody—a wink here, a nudge there—but following up a film that was so bleak with one that feels so am-dram absurdist just jars. Critics have argued that this camp bias is typical of Scott over the past decade and a half, pointing to divisive historical dramas such as Napoleon (2023), as my colleague Louis Chilton wrote, was “often, and very deliberately, funny,” in a staunch defense of the film’s hokey, over-the-top script. But be that as it may, I just can’t understand why a script so inert and bordering on parody has been praised for not taking itself seriously.

When Gladiator premiered in May 2000 and successfully revived an ailing, outdated genre, one that had been brutally falsified in Fly! and Monty Python. This sequel feels like a step backwards; I bet Crowe is shaking. As Maximus famously said, “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” He certainly wasn’t expecting accompanying laughter.

‘Gladiator II’ is in theaters