‘Gladiator II’ is more than just a play

Long before “thinking about the Roman Empire” became shorthand for having a hyper-fixation, Ridley Scott turned the actual Roman Empire into a mainstream obsession. In 2000, the director’s sword-and-sandal blockbuster Gladiator muscled its way to become the year’s second-highest-grossing film before winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and cementing its status as—I’m just guessing here—your dad’s favorite movie of all time. “Aren’t you amused?!” Russell Crowe’s Maximus gripped the audience in a memorable uplifting scene. We really were: Here was an almost absurdly simple tale of revenge that Scott, via visceral fight scenes (and real tigers), turned into a maximalist epic.

Before Gladiator IInow in theaters, Scott has somehow taken it a step further. The sequel has twice as many heroes to root for and twice as many emperors to root against, plus a wild card in the form of Denzel Washington’s conniving arms dealer, Macrinus. Instead of tigers, battles in the arena now involve a menagerie of baboons, sharks and a rhinoceros. Even the opening credits are designed to excite the audience: Key scenes from the previous film is animated in a picturesque sequence that lands on a title card that stylizes the sequel’s name as, gloriously, GLADIATOR. It is so magnificent that the audience at my screening started clapping before a single match had begun.

Read: Are we having too much fun?

Set 16 years after the events of Gladiatorthe sequel follows Lucius (Paul Mescal), son of Maximus and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, reprising her role). Lucilla secretly sent the young Lucius away to the kingdom of Numidia for his protection after Maximus’ death. In the years since, a lot has happened, which we learn through overly ornate flashbacks and exposition. Lucius has come to resent his homeland and his mother, given their time apart. This anger grows into fury after Roman forces, led by Lucilla’s new husband, General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), capture Numidia in an opening battle that leads to the death of Lucius’ wife. In Rome, meanwhile, a pair of snotty brothers named Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) have become co-emperors. Their ruthless leadership inspired a resistance led by Lucilla and Acacius, and made the city fertile ground for the rise of opportunistic power players like Macrinus.

The plot, packed with so many shadowy conspiracies and cunning characters, is far less straightforward than that in Gladiatorto its detriment. But amid the bloat, Scott shares how the cycle of ambition and retribution can be hard to break. Bloodshed is the cause and effect of every twist in history, the reason behind Rome’s turmoil and the apparent solution to its problems. Violence demands the spotlight, and Gladiator II draws tension from the fact that many of its characters cannot escape their attraction to brutality. In Scott’s hands, ancient Rome has never been more ruthless – or more exciting to watch.

The director is a master at extracting elegance from harsh backdrops. During the attack on Lucius’ home, embers swirl like snow, flecks of water and mud slam into the camera lens, and every strike of a sword or punch lands with primal intensity. Inside the Colosseum, despite the noticeably heavy use of CGI, Scott finds striking images in the chaos: A pool of blood blooms underwater. An arrow flashes across the field. A gladiator throws sand into the air. These images are fascinating to the viewer and convey the strange attraction of battle to the combatants themselves.

These energetic fight scenes are matched by a collection of flamboyant performances where they play the villains who steal the show. Mescal and Pascal embody the gravitas of their roles and almost go wild when forced into the Coliseum. But Quinn and Hechinger have much more fun leaning into their characters’ boyish humility, echoing Joaquin Phoenix’s work as the man-child emperor Commodus from Gladiator. Washington, however, runs away with the film: Armed with a Cheshire cat grin, heaps of jewelry and seemingly unlimited glasses of wine, Macrinus plays with Rome as if it were a massive chessboard filled with pawns, and the actor embraces the script’s numerous twists and turns. He imbues the character with an infectious joy in every scene, whether he’s cheering on the men cutting each other down inside the arena or quietly trying to manipulate Lucius into doing his bidding.

For all the fun it has, Gladiator II requires a working knowledge of its predecessor’s history to understand the stakes, which also means it magnifies the original film’s flaws. The characters are more thinly drawn, with superficial motives despite the inventions of the plot. The dialogue is more stilted, peppered with slapstick observations about “the dream of Rome” in the face of an empire that repeatedly fails to learn its lesson. And the ending puts forward the vague notion that Rome’s future depends on uniting its people—a serious sentiment, perhaps, but a pretty boring conclusion to reach after two hours of savagery.

Then again, Gladiator II claims to offer nothing but pure performance. The finale gestures towards the idea that hope is its own form of power, but even Lucius admits to its limits as a peacekeeping force. “You look like I need to speak,” Lucius says as he addresses opposing armies about to do battle. “I don’t know what to say.” Perhaps Macrinus, who believes that Rome is doomed to brutality and bloodshed, has a point when he claims that violence is “the universal language.” After all, to borrow the words of a revered gladiator, it is undeniably entertaining.