Gladiator II (2024)
Directed by Ridley Scott
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 Rome with an iron fist. With rage in his heart and the future of the Empire at stake, Lucius must look to his past to find strength and honor to return the glory of Rome to its people.
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It is basically the sibling rivalry of Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” (1956) meets “Spartacus” (1960), but without as much colorful pageantry, more wooden dialogue and zero theatricality.
It has a modern outlook but provides a throwback, too, to the genre’s florid history – a flirtatious Claudette Colbert marinating in her milk bath in 1932’s The Sign of the Cross, or a pouting Peter Ustinov as Emperor Nero lounging about in silks and velvets in 1951’s Quo Vadis.
It has a modern outlook but provides a throwback, too, to the genre’s florid history – a flirtatious Claudette Colbert marinating in her milk bath in 1932’s The Sign of the Cross, or a pouting Peter Ustinov as Emperor Nero lounging about in silks and velvets in 1951’s Quo Vadis. This time, they’ve put sharks in the Colosseum.
It is basically the sibling rivalry of Cecil B. DeMille's “The Ten Commandments” (1956) meets “Spartacus” (1960), but without as much colorful pageantry, more wooden dialogue and zero theatricality.
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Not only do they manage to rival Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus from the original Gladiator in terms of crazed volatility, they also have a distinct whiff of the ultimate mad emperor Caligula about them. Think John Hurt’s pasty-faced look as Caligula in ’70s TV classic I, Claudius and Malcolm McDowell’s version of the same historically bonkers figure in the notorious 1979 film Caligula. There’s even a hilarious counterpart to Caligula’s infamous beloved pet horse, in the form of Caracalla’s pet capuchin monkey, perched on his shoulder, who arguably has the film’s most startling character arc.
Scott seems contented to repeat what feels to be the exact same beats in this milieu, mounting a toxic mentor/slave relationship between Mescal and Washington, which plays similar to the Russell Crowe/Oliver Reed dynamic of the first film, and doubling up on nasty, sniveling emperors Geta and Caracalla, who are portrayed as spineless, mildly incestuous madmen by Joseph Quinn (resembling Robert Downey Jr. in his Less Than Zero era) and Fred Hechinger (who gets to anoint a primate the same way Caligula memorialized his beloved horse).
David Scarpa, who previously wrote Scott's two movies All the Money in the World and last year's Napoleon, opts for the slavish route that echoes the first movie's storytelling beats right down to the revenge angle.
Screenwriter David Scarpa — who also penned “All the Money in the World” and “Napoleon” — constantly invites comparisons to the original by making explicit references to key lines of dialogue and remixing iconic scenes.
The bulk of the blame resides at screenwriter David Scarpa’s doorstep. The scribe, who wrote Scott’s All the Money in the World and last year’s Napoleon, makes this an unnecessary continuation. Long gone are the epic speeches (“Where death is, we are not” pales compared to David Franzoni, William Nicholson and John Logan’s “Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back”) and the emotional heft of Gladiator is lacking.
The script by David Scarpa, who previously worked with Scott on “Napoleon” and “All the Money in the World,” begins in the early third century, some two decades after the events of the original (which closed around 193), with an attack on Numidia, apparently a kingdom (rather than the Roman province it actually was) ruled by brawny chieftain Jugurtha (Peter Mensah), by a fleet led by the Roman general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal).
But it almost feels like Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa (who also wrote the Scott films "All the Money in the World" and "Napoleon") are performing a little bait-and-switch.
The screenplay, credited to David Scarpa (who wrote Napoleon and All the Money in the World for Scott), often seems as close to a remake as a sequel. It follows the template of David Franzoni’s earlier Gladiator script almost beat for beat, most of its characters traceable to direct counterparts from that film.
Despite the massive impact that it had on popular culture, including kick-starting another cycle of Sword and Sandals movies such as Troy (2004), a sequel has found itself stuck in development hell for two decades, while Scott has remained prolific on projects both similar and very different.
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Maximus was a highly respected and beloved Roman general who was sold into slavery and forced to fight to ultimately become the greatest gladiator Ancient Rome had ever seen. Before his life was turned upside down, Maximus was the apple of the emperor’s eye, even over his own son, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix, of Joker).
In the twenty-four years it’s taken for Ridley Scott to make a sequel to his Oscar-winning epic Gladiator, the director has seen a number of highs (Black Hawk Down, The Martian, the criminally underrated The Last Duel), a lot of lows (Hannibal, Exodus: Gods and Kings, his woeful Gladiator-esque take on Robin Hood), and a whole load of “what the hell was he thinking?” (The Counsellor, House of Gucci, both of his wildly divisive Alien prequels).