Gladiator 2 is bad, but there is one good reason to watch it.

Devises a logical sequel to the Oscar-winning 2000 blockbuster Gladiator was not an obvious task, as the hero from the original, Russell Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius, does not survive the film. Instead of going back in time and imagining an origin story for Maximus, director Ridley Scott and his longtime screenwriter David Scarpa (Napoleon, All the money in the world) has chosen to set the story a generation after the events of the first film. That choice, in and of itself, wasn’t a bad one: The prequel as an excuse for franchise expansion has become such a cliché that it’s generated its own genre of online joke (see: calling a particularly insane news story or social phenomenon one’s “villain origin story “). But Gladiator 2 (or as it is spelled in the opening title, Gladiator) unfortunately comes off as less of a reinvention of the original than an oddly literal retread of its plot beats, characters, and themes.

Scott, still an active and relevant filmmaker at age 86, isn’t returning to this material to cash in on the audience that was out there waiting for the follow-up to a 24-year-old sword-and-sandal epic. Just looked at the early 19^th– century face of tyranny i NapoleonEver interested in history, Scott now seems interested in turning his attention to the power and corruption of Imperial Rome. in the heart, Gladiator 2 is more a drama of palace intrigue than an action film, although Scott serves up a Roman banquet-sized abundance of sword-clashing, shield-smashing and helmet-slashing. Scott has always known how to direct an exhilarating large-scale action sequence, but the advance of CGI has made these elaborate spectacles both less plausible and harder not to laugh through: Did we really need the perfect naval battle inside the Colosseum to be complete with circling sharks?

If you answered that question with a hearty “Hell yes!” so maybe Gladiator 2 is the holiday movie for you. But I make no guarantees that a taste for bread and circuses will get you through the dramatic longueurs of this two-and-a-half-hour saga, which would be intolerably dull if only one man were present – not our noble and himself. -sacrificing hero, but his cunning archenemy. If Russell Crowe’s solid star power was what made the first one Gladiator memorable (even with stiff competition from a young Joaquin Phoenix as the Mad Emperor Commodus), what holds Gladiator 2 soaring is Denzel Washington’s charismatic villainy as the deceptively relaxed courtier Macrinus. Paul Mescal’s Lucius, the nominal hero and long-banished heir to the now-legendary Maximus, is given little more to do than pine for his butchered wife and sulk and sulk, in dwindling numbers, through one fight sequence after another.

Seam Gladiator 2 begins, Lucius lives humbly as a farmer in a North African colony, though his parentage is easily guessed from clues in an early flashback. (The revelation of his true identity is also given away in the film’s trailer.) When Lucius is kidnapped by the Roman army to be sold into slavery after the murder of his wife—a set-up depressingly identical to that of the first film—Washington’s Macrinus, a formerly enslaved person turned into a trafficker in human flesh, observes , the young man’s fire and fighting prowess and takes it upon himself to train him for the gladiatorial ring.

Meanwhile, the greatness that was Rome is being driven into the ground by two cheeky, pleasure-seeking brothers, the co-emperors Geta (Stranger Things‘ Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (The white lotusFred Hechinger). These debauched and vaguely inbred seeming despots, one of whom goes everywhere with a well-dressed monkey on his shoulder, are a far cry from Lucius’ grandfather Marcus Aurelius, the wise and principled leader of just two generations before.

Upon his arrival in Rome, the invincible and not for nothing hunky Lucius becomes a fan favorite at the Colosseum, where bloodthirsty crowds cheer as human bodies are torn apart by tigers or attacked by warriors mounted on rhinoceros (unfortunately, unlike in the 2000 film, there are no images of sumptuous banquet tables groaning under roasting platters of rhinoceros head). When Lucius’s mother, the noblewoman Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, reprising her role from the 2000 film), learns that her long-lost son is back in Rome and regularly being served to wild animals, she visits him in his prison cell for to try to heal the rift caused by their separation long ago. Lucilla is married to the empire’s greatest military leader, General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), a good man troubled by the senseless bloodshed of the emperors’ wars of conquest; like Crowe’s character in the original, he secretly assembles a rebel army to retake Rome for the people.

Lucius and Marcus Acacius will inevitably be forced to meet in the gladiatorial arena, but when they do, it’s such a match for Dudley Do-Rights that it’s hard to get any rooting interest. Mescal and Pascal can both be wonderful actors in the right role, but they seem out of place as beefcake daddy warriors in box-pleated miniskirts. While they both look impressively ripped and can hack their way through a convincing fight scene, they never – unlike Crowe in the first film – manage to turn brooding while brave into a dramatically engaging pursuit. Fortunately, Washington is there to liven things up with his sly wit and unexpected lines. (“It’s politicsssss,” he tells another character at one point, somehow investing the long “s” with such a cynical excess of meaning that he had the entire audience in stitches with a simple drawn out consonant .)

When pedants came after Scott about the historical accuracy of some details last year Napoleonthe venerable director of such genre-reinventing classics as Alien and Blade Runner hilariously advised his haters to “get a life.” And he’s right—there are touches of humorous excess in his latest historical epic (cf. Ben Affleck’s magnificently campy turn as a missing count in The final duel), which stand out as the films most memorable moments. The problem with Gladiator 2 isn’t it the xenomorph-like design of the giant CGI baboons on fire at poor Lucius in the Colosseum; it’s the audience’s sense that we’ve seen a lot of this before, sometimes quite literally, as scenes from the original film are revisited in recurring soft-focus flashbacks. Aren’t we amused? Well, we were back in 2000.