What happens when you take one of the most irreverent filmmakers of our times, and force him to be sombre, sincere and melodramatic? The result is a film like Gladiator II. It’s not to say that the sequel doesn’t have the campy goodness of the original, especially in the turns by Denzel Washington playing Macrinus (a gladiator-turned-influential figure in Rome), Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger playing Emperor twins Geta and Caracalla (a more sadistic version of Romulus and Remus), but there’s something amiss.
Gladiator (2000), starring Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen among others, fell into place around Crowe’s astounding central performance as Maximus Decimus Meridius — equal parts moving, thrilling, actor and star. Paul Mescal’s performance never quite lends gravitas to the sequel, and it might not have much to do with the actor himself, or even the written word. Something never quite clicks into place about Lucius (Mescal) and why he’s a protagonist worth rooting for.
Director Ridley Scott established Maximus as a haunted father/husband with a chilling shot (by John Mathieson, who returns to his duties in the sequel too) when he’s hugging the feet of his wife’s burnt corpse hanging from the roof of his home. Even in melodrama, the 2000 film knew economy and restraint, something the sequel never comes close to imbibing. The excesses of Gladiator II only seem to convey its big budget and emphasise on its scale, but they never quite communicate any feelings. It’s a shame really, because on paper, Scott still seems to have a lot of fondness for that world.
Gladiator II begins two decades after the events of the first film. Rome hasn’t become the democracy as envisioned by Marcus Aurelius, something Maximus gave his life for, after killing Commodus (Phoenix). If anything, the Romans have become even more imperialist, conquering all the way till the Northern parts of Africa under the able leadership of their General Accacius (a world-weary Pedro Pascal). After giving the viewers a refresher on the most iconic images from the first film, the film begins in Numidia, a North African kingdom, and the last frontier for the Roman empire to gain complete domination of the region. The Numidian forces are commanded by a pale-looking boy(Mescal), the runaway prince of the Roman empire, known by the locals as Hannos.
An an epic battle sequence quickly disintegrates after Hannos sees his wife killed on Accacius’s orders. Hannos is grievously injured, and taken prisoner by the Roman army. Stewing in his vengeance for Accacius’s head, Hannos goes on to become a renowned gladiator in the Colosseum – the prime entertainment arena in Rome – for the amusement of the psychotic twin emperors, and the people. As Commodus sums up the plot of the first film, “The general who became a slave. The slave who became a gladiator. The gladiator who defied an emperor. Striking story!” Scott retreads the same arc as the last time, without any surprises, which is frankly shocking for a filmmaker like him.
But it becomes apparent pretty early on that Scott’s heart isn’t fully into the sequel. Especially, when I saw CGI baboons fighting Hanno in a trial by combat. The film does its best to convince us that they’re real, and probably even Hollywood with its thousands of overworked VFX artists couldn’t make it look more realistic than this, but once I picked on its artificial beasts, the stakes for the fight dissipated almost immediately. Similarly with some more CGI sharks and a rhinoceros; I don’t doubt Scott did his best to make the creatures seem as realistic as possible, but I was largely unmoved by any of the battle set-pieces. The action in Gladiator II is its most visceral during hand-to-hand combat sequences.
Mescal fully commits to the physicality of his character, fighting with nothing to lose. But the impact of most action set-pieces are muted, compared to the visceral sequences in the original film (put together with fewer resources). It’s not Scott’s fault that the Indian censors cut a beheading scene (oh, the irony!), resulting in a jump-cut in the middle of a thrilling battle sequence.
It also doesn’t help that the sequel is full of adequate-but-largely unmemorable performances. Mescal goes in the opposite direction of Crowe’s brooding Maximus, and is shown to like to talk to an Indian doctor, Ravi (Alexander Karim) tasked with mending the Gladiators in the arena. Ravi, hailing from Varanasi we’re told, almost becomes Hanno’s therapist. You can see Scott and writers Peter Craig and David Scarpa, trying to repeat the magnificence of Djimon Honsou from the first film, whose character, Juba, lends so much heft to the scenes with Maximus.
Washington, playing a slave-turned-gladiator-turned-free man-turned-politician Macrinus, is a treat to watch as he chews the scenery with his New York accent, not bothering to do an affectation for period specificity. It’s a thrilling, scene-stealing performance that is let down by a rushed, nondescript send off. Pascal shows promise as the dutiful, conscientious general, who realises the cost of war he’s inflicting on behalf of his reckless, apathetic emperors. But even his Accacius doesn’t get the real estate that he deserves to flourish.
Gladiator II is the kind of busy film, where a lot appears to be happening. But once you step back, you see how the narrative is resting on proven territory, rather than trying something new. This is the kind of sequel that is green-lit because of spreadsheets, with business consultants approximating how many seats it will fill within the first weekend, even in a worst-case scenario. This might be a safe, respectable sequel for a groundbreaking action film. But I’m almost certain that Scott — who would mock his creation rather than adore it — will not think about this film after the opening weekend.
