Since so many modern men apparently think about the Roman Empire “every day,” it seems only appropriate for director Ridley Scott to revisit the world of his massively-successful, Oscar-winning epic Gladiator (2000). Even if its lore was very loosely based on reality, those uber-masculine, ruthless times seem ripe as a wanna-be political allegory for those who think Western civilization (or more specifically the United States) is in decline, and just needs to be taken back with old-fashioned common-man RAGE. For the rest of us, it’s at the very least visually-impressive swords-and-sandals escapism.
The common man, this time around, is Lucius (Paul Mescal) a soldier in North Africa who is taken as a Roman slave when General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal)’s armada spectacularly raids and destroys the fortified seaside city of Numidia. Lucius’ badass warrior wife is killed, and he is thrown into a ship’s hold and brought across the waters to a foreign land. In a Roman-era equivalent of a slave auction, Lucius and his comrades are tossed into a ring to show off their survival skills against weirdly-CGI’d wild baboons. With his chompy, feral fighting attitude, Lucius impresses the gladiator-peddler Macrinus (Denzel Washington), who snaps up scrappy Lucius to fight in Rome. Macrinus sees RAGE in the slave, but more importantly potential financial (and political) windfall if his fighter wins. If his gladiator dies in the ring, well, he’ll just go find another.
But we know that Lucius is no common man. He quotes Virgil, for one thing (fancy!), and his mannerisms are immediately recognized by one of the esteemed royals watching the gladiators in the Colosseum, his own mother Lucilla (Connie Nielsen). After Lucius’ father Maximus (Russell Crowe in the first film) was killed, Lucilla sent her son away to exile for protection. The problem is now Lucius is mad at her (abandonment!) and his focus (and the promised reward of his RAGE) is to take the head of Lucilla’s now-husband, General Acacius. Complicated! (Also, I’m here to say that Connie Nielsen pulls of the most impressive special effect of them all, convincingly and luminously aging only 16 years on screen while 24 years have passed in real life.)
Gladiator II takes ingredients from the first film and amps them up. Where there were tigers in the Colosseum the first time around, this time you have a battle-armored rhinoceros and even killer sharks lurking in the flooded stadium’s waters! The first time, there was one simpering, cackling young emperor; this time there are TWO, the wild-eyed, pancake-makeupped “twins” Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger). Plus Ridley Scott has taken the leaps and bounds in special effects of the last couple of decades and put them to great use staging historical epics (see also Napoleon and The Last Duel) arguably better than anyone else. As my companion leaned over and mentioned, you could practically smell the filth and squalor of the disaffected Roman masses wafting from the screen.
Paul Mescal, who has proven himself a lovely, sensitive actor in movies like Aftersun and All of Us Strangers (my favorite movie last year), seems a little stuck in what is almost entirely a physical role. He is all buffed-out for the character, and certainly has the look and moves of a fighter, but the clunky script does him no favors. His dialogue is spare, leaving him to just look vengeful and sweaty (which of course, it can be said, has its appeal) for much of the film. His character only really sparks to life when chuckling at a joke from his comrade gladiators, or talking about what-if scenarios of actually surviving the fights with the gladiator-turned doctor Ravi.
But the real star of the show is the scenery-chewing Denzel Washington. Is that a surprise, really? He seems to be having a blast here as the gladiator-wrangler Macrinus, making the thin screenplay seem like Shakespeare. He swaggers with self-proclaimed power when he walks into a room, becoming actually powerful by sheer force of will (and lots of manipulation). Maybe it’s because he has never truly been given the chance to play in the playground of a big-budget historical epic like this, but Denzel seems practically gleeful playing dress-up, dramatically flipping the sleeves of the seeming yards of fabric that make up his Roman robe. Honestly, you can’t help but imagine how much more interesting Gladiator II would have been if Washington’s character were the focus instead.
