This son-of-Gladiator sequel is timelier than the first.
Ridley Scott’s Gladiator from 2000 was never good enough to develop a cult following — it was a convictionless, ersatz version of sword-and-sandal movies now known as the peplum genre. Who could have predicted that Ultrahack Scott’s Gladiator II project might have appeal for moviegoers sensitive to the ways a genre movie can touch on current events and attitudes?
Scott’s perfunctory approach fits screenwriter David Scarpa’s pragmatic conceit to make this son-of-Gladiator at least relevant to the social moment. Scarpa parallels the Rome-before-the-fall storyline to our empire’s current crisis, and Scott hits his marks — a series of challenge and revenge scenarios with flashes of art-director splendor and absurd F/X spectacle (including a scissors-like sword decapitation, plus vicious monkey-dog hybrids and sharks in the colosseum).
The first film failed its Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis, and Spartacus antecedents, but Scarpa adds a quasi-political essence to the formula that almost seems an inspired, if cynical, match for the antiquity setting — described when one character notes, “Crucifixions are for thieves and Christians.” Scarpa also wrote Scott’s J. Paul Getty fictionalization All the Money in the World, Napoleon, and the military-power allegory The Last Castle, but timely political coincidences sustain this otherwise hoary tale.
Recent politics have revealed everyone’s morality or lack thereof, so it’s fascinating to watch everyman Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal) follow his moral impulses and discover the truth about his hidden ancestry and the truth about the twisted Empire. Corruption flourishes under the rule of decadent Roman emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger). Lucius comes into his uneasy heritage after defeat in the erroneous homeland where he is considered a barbarian. He takes the same path as his late father Maximus (Russell Crowe in flashbacks). The eternal fight for liberty — slaves into gladiators, gladiators into free men — calls for courage and purpose beyond Lucius’s nightmarish expectations, uncovering the treachery and chicanery of Roman politics.
Gladiator II is the movie that Francis Ford Coppola’s quasi-classical/futuristic Megalopolis should have been. Scarpa’s allegory clarifies the political games-playing that few have heeded from Roman history or imperial mythology. His update inserts a villain, Denzel Washington’s scheming Macrinus, a former enslaved gladiator, who uses Lucius to achieve his own vengeance. This pivotal character empowers Lucius’s misguided hatred of Roman General Acacius (Pedro Pascal) and exploits the hidden Oedipal bond between Lucius and his mother Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), daughter of Marcus Aurelius and former lover of Maximus.
This narrative represents Millennial Hollywood at its most opportunistic, trading social-justice platitudes for bloodlust. “Violence is the universal language,” Denzel’s Macrinus proclaims, recalling the American Gangster bluster he summoned for Scott. Denzel is finally able to act out his one-time fantasy of portraying Jean-Jacques Dessalines in a movie about the Haitian revolution. Gladiator II isn’t exactly that, but Macrinus’s seduction of Lucius (“I choose rage. Rage pours out of you like milk from a whore’s tit.”) comes near, at least as close as Sidney Poitier’s berserk Muslim, King Aly Mansuh, in the 1964 Crusades drama The Long Ships — complete with flapping gold cape.
When Macrinus declares, “Insurrection has been revealed,” Gladiator II takes a turn that can only be called Trumpian, exposing the treachery of Rome’s toadying senators, the lascivious emperors, and the open threat that Acacius’s “death must be public!” Macrinus holds Geta’s bloody severed head the way Kathy Griffin posed with Trump 45’s. It’s the culmination of Macrinus’s secret plan: “Rome must fall. I need only give it a push.”
Lucius makes a last populist stand in the middle of the arena, shouting, “Is this how Rome treats its citizens?” Yet Macrinus has already declared, “This is what they believe in — power!” Thus, his attempted coup and the rationalization “Politics follow power.” The avenger claims “the defense of a new republic.”
As product, Gladiator II emulates both peplum entertainment and the classics. Mescal’s Lucius is a runty hero, Denzel’s undignified hamminess falls short of Shakespearean grandeur, and only the small roles — the surprisingly noble Pascal and Nielsen, with her womanly stride through the dark corridors of power — achieve human dimension. This bread-and-circuses flick might have purged what’s driving so many people crazy about political behavior. Instead, every inexpressive shot and edit connects Gladiator II to Coppola’s Megalopolis and Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon. They all suggest political shock and artistic futility at this point in American film culture.