Savage baboons. Killer sharks. Opium hits. Panto villains. Ridley Scott’s brawny, bloodthirsty, and occasionally wildly camp sequel is not your dad’s Gladiator movie – or your history teacher’s. But for all its flaws, it’s a colossally entertaining ride that never stints on its efforts to wow you with its scale and spectacle.
Where Gladiator (2000) deftly intercut its battle scenes with subtly plotted political manoeuvrings, this one works best when it’s just winding up one of its ballistas and launching a fireball at your head. There’s a brutal extravagance to the action, a dedication to the film’s theme of violence as a portent of social collapse that manifests in an extra slather of chopped limbs and slashing wounds.
We’re 16 years on from the events of that now-canonical first film, and our new hero, Paul Mescal’s Lucius Verus, has grown from Commodus’s imperilled nephew at the end of Gladiator to a loved-up family man living in happy exile in a coastal city in north Africa.
The opening sea battle puts paid to all that. A fleet of Roman triremes under the command of Pedro Pascal’s upstanding general, Marcus Acacius, descend on Lucius and his wife’s seaside citadel. What follows unleashes hell on a similar scale to Russell Crowe’s opening scrap in Germania in the first film, by way of Kingdom of Heaven’s vast Siege of Jerusalem sequence. Scott has lost none of his feel for combat on this scale.
Most of the movie is set in a ravishingly-replicated Rome, rendered in dusty and lived-in detail with CGI generations ahead of its visually groundbreaking predecessor. Here, a waning Roman Empire is presided over, violently and impulsively, by co-Emperors Caracalla and Geta (Fred Hechinger and Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn, caked in white foundation and giving major Cinderella’s Ugly Sisters). They placate a restive populace with endless games in the Colosseum, a mincer into which Mescal’s captive and vengeful Lucius is fed.
For all its flaws, it’s a colossally entertaining ride
Under the patronage of Denzel Washington’s scheming gladiator entrepreneur Macrinus – the equivalent to Oliver Reed’s Proximo in the first film – Lucius rallies his fellow fighters against rhino-riding champions, and sea battles in a flooded arena swarming with hungry sharks.
Napoleon writer David Scarpa’s ripe screenplay digs into the idea of a civilised society circling the drain under the spell of ‘Make Rome Great Again’-style despotary and slippery senators, while generals grow weary of the madness. The cloak-and-dagger stuff isn’t nearly as elegant as in the first film, and Joaquin Phoenix’s psychologically complex brand of villainy is much missed. But in the flamboyant Washington, it has a trump card that pays off in a gripping and slickly executed final stretch.
And Mescal? The Irishman proves that his charisma upscales to a monster blockbuster, without losing that rare sensitivity that powered his Aftersun and Normal People breakthroughs. He’s not peak Russell Crowe – who is? – but he holds the reins effectively enough on Scott’s hard-charging chariot.
In UK cinemas Nov 15 and US theaters Nov 22.