Years after witnessing the death of the revered hero Maximus at the hands of his uncle, Lucius is forced to enter the Colosseum after his home is conquered by the tyrannical Emperors who now lead R...
While “Gladiator II” achieves its primary function of giving us an experience to roar for, what it had to sacrifice to reach those heights proves not all entertainment can be bought.
This is essentially the first movie all over again and that isn’t hyperbole. So many of its predecessors beats and concepts are repeated here at nauseam, that any weight and personality it has buried underneath its thick sheets of armor don’t get realized until the last hour and even then, those plotlines tend to exhaust themselves early before their full potential bears fruit. Tension is starkly absent and momentum comes and goes very quickly despite being engorged in a time period that should be ripe with both. In its place are loud, fragmented, and sometimes bizarre spectacles congealed together by a complicated narrative process where some ideas work better than others but the elongated structure specifically hard-coded with dismal vital clarity render everything, including the fights, as filler.
Nothing is properly given ample time or space to blend personal journeys with larger thematic explorations the way Ridley Scott normally does well with and there’s barely any ebb and flow with the scheming and backstabbing to make the narrative more cohesive. Between the rediscovery of linage and remembering what one stood for and various plots to overthrow the emperors to either wrest control and put the empire in the hands of a single man or return Rome to its days as a republic, any one of these themes feel right at home in a Gladiator film. But all that political chessboard intrigue is equipped with such a narrow focus, it doesn’t inform and support Lucius’ journey the way it did for Maximus, especially since the former’s character arc feels much more abrupt and incomplete than the latter.
And that especially applies to Ridley Scott, whose normally condensed painters eye and display of honest, tragic brutality mirror a meditative tug of war, is replaced with such low energy and stock inflexibility, I couldn’t even recognize it was even him directing this.
The settings and costumes are about as meticulously composed and visually appealing as the previous Gladiator film, but the production design often gives the city the appearance of a midwest strip mall in both size and quality. Lots of prison cells and shadowy alleys get repeated at nauseam and while sure, there’s much more to see here than in the first film, quantity of quality further relegates many otherwise important contextual scenes and climaxes to screensaver purgatory with rather disappointing VFX to show for it.
Pacing does thankfully rise and relax in conjunction with the narrative, its tone is consistent enough to overlook its many out-of-place moments, atmosphere is barely decipherable and concentrated, the score remains bombastic and lively with captivating sound design to bolster the ranks (even if most of it is taken from the first film) and in contrast to the originals overbearance on irritating slow-mo and smash cuts with its action sequences, they’re much more forgiving this time as far as, you know, actual visibility. That being said, all the action sequences’ utter insanity can’t conceal how thin and underweight many of these brawls quickly become and it doesn’t take away from how broodingly milquetoast the actual camerawork and editing are. I could only count one memorable shot in the whole movie and that’s near the very beginning.
And many of the performances, while captivating, don’t feel like they belong together; like they’re actively trying to steal the movie from each other. Denzel Washington gives out the best performance and is equipped with the best character by default while Paul Mescal’s character is hampered less by his performance and more of the script failing to paint him exactly like Maximus.
Not so much the second coming of the Pompeii eruption but a tiring trudge up the Vatican hill, there’s nothing you’ve seen here in “Gladiator II” that you won’t receive and feel twice over with its predecessor. The large foray of recycled story beats and meandering void of nothingness at its disposal will not echo in eternity like what came before it.
