So much about ‘Gladiator 2’ doesn’t add up

Since Gladiator was one of my favorite movies of all time, I was hesitant to watch Gladiator 2as I didn’t really want the original tarnished by an underwhelming sequel.

Instead, I was…overwhelmed, I guess. I think Gladiator 2 has some good aspects, those aspects are called Denzel Washington, but so much about the setup and structure of this movie is bizarre that I would discuss it with other people who have seen it. Spoilers naturally follow.

• The biggest problem I have is that at least the entire first half of the movie doesn’t just establish a very Maximus-like path for Hanno, it’s a very strange dance about his identity where we, the audience, openly know that Hanno is Lucius, but it is unclear whether he by. So, if you’ve seen the first film, it’s very clear that Lucius is actually Maximus’ son, which the film treats as a kind of big reveal (at one point during my pre-film coverage, the studio emailed me to remind me that Lucius’ father’s identity was officially a “mystery”). In the end, we learn that Lucius knew he was Lucius but didn’t know he was Maximus’ son, and it’s all kind of a mess of figuring out what the audience needs to know, what the audience needs to be surprised by, and the same questions exist for the characters in the film.
• There is also virtually no time allotted in this two and a half hour film for what happened to Lucius for the past 16 years. Was the plan actually for Lucilla to send him away and…never see him again? The movie made it seem like we were going to see some sort of shipwreck or disaster that diverts him from whatever the plan was, but instead we just hear that he was found wandering around and adopted into his African community without further elaboration. So he’s mad at his mom for… sending him away to save his life? Why she never went to find him is a good question, but the movie has no real answers to this, or what the plan was originally supposed to be here, and what may have gone wrong along the way.

• This wasn’t necessarily a bad plot, but one of the most shocking scenes in the film is oddly shot in Denzel’s Macrinus killing Emperor Geta from behind Emperor Caracalla, but the way it’s filmed it seems , that he murders them both, which makes it a bit confusing when Caracalla appears in the next scene. I can’t tell if it was meant to be confused on purpose or if it was just poorly filmed.
• So much of this movie was spoiled by the basic concept and the trailer. Aside from the whole “we obviously know who Paul Mescal is from the start” issue, the fact that Pedro Pascal’s Marcus Acacius is described in the synopsis as a “disgraced general” and we see him fighting in the arena against Lucius takes all the air. of the film’s plot to overthrow the emperors. We know it will fail from the moment we hear the plan hatched. Likewise, I’ve never seen a character who was more obviously going to die than Lucius’ wife Arishat from literally fifteen seconds after she was introduced. Huge chunks of the story here are just broadcast so loudly that there are few surprises.
• A surprise, and the best stretch of the film, is when Macrinus’ plot to seize power is revealed, which I admittedly did not see coming. At least not to the extent that he effectively takes control of the entire empire. But this too had a pretty big flaw at the end. If Macrinus simply…hadn’t run out in front of the army and done this unnecessary 1v1 fight against Lucius, he could have just stayed back and had his army crush the other one, since it seems less likely that Lucius’ high school football speech would work in that context (also does the enemy army just take his word that he is the prince of Rome at that moment?). Nor was it in keeping with Macrinus’s character to throw himself into danger and engage in physical combat with a master gladiator, when his whole thing was to be a puppet-master in the shadows.

Most of this didn’t work for me. Denzel saved a good portion of the movie, but suspension of disbelief only goes so far when it comes to these storylines, and this story just didn’t make much sense or was presented confusingly, at best. It’s not the original, not even close.

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