Gladiator II (2024)

Watched 11/21/24 (theater)

The gall of the producers to empower someone as unreliable and simultaneously pure genius as Ridley Scott is…understandable gall. $200-$300mil of unchecked capitalism being applied to a gauntlet of Coliseum battles is something that, on paper, would be the ultimate cocktail of testosterone and hard-earned box-office dollars. The original Gladiator understood that. But does Gladiator II?

I remember 5th grade, 10 or 11 years old, my dad telling me, “this is THE weekend.” He meant that we would be watching my first rated-R movie, and it was to be Gladiator. MPAA and their fascist censorship be damned, my dad decided.

At the time, I did not notice the shaky cam of the fight scenes, nor the laziness of those scenes’ cutaways as blades penetrated flesh. These are things that I now can’t help but be slightly bothered by when returning to the original. Luckily, the patient staging of that first movie is something that has stuck with me age 11 through 26. Masterful staging, with each character being given perfectly appropriate screentime during battle scenes in particular, with reactions and timing feeling much more documentary than fiction. As if you were truly dropped into a season of gladiatorial fights with the detail of Hard Knocks. And the dialogue scenes, as well, everyone lingers onscreen just long enough to sell whatever they are being asked to sell.

I expected Gladiator II to be the dumber, more exciting sequel that Ridley Scott would considerably exceed his technical skill with. In some ways, I was correct. It is dumb. Extremely dumb………. That is the only thing that I was right about. This is one of the most frustratingly impatient, unprofessional, and unsatisfying blockbusters in years—full stop. I was genuinely shocked by such a lack of care and detail, such an overage of unintentional comedy and runaway camp. A way does exist to trojan horse a good movie into a money-maker legasequel, but GII is unfortunately not interested in that.

Gladiator II, like All the Money in the World and Napoleon before it, was written by David Scarpa. This is a problem because David Scarpa feels more like a pet writer of Ridley Scott, completely devoid of any personality of his own outside of a handful of comedic beats. All of the best moments in this movie, though there are few, come by performance, not writing. There is not a single memorable line, with just about every piece of dialogue being painfully generic or hilariously unnatural. It has a little bit of that Star Wars prequels thing going on where it’s like the writer is an alien and has never heard people speak English before. Or if he has, he just uses the most basic of language to convey meaning—there was never a second draft on the dialogue here.

Then, there’s Ridley Scott. A director that I love. I believe Ridley Scott to be a genius. I like his sense of humor. I think he has made some of the most thrilling large and small-scale scenes in movie history. How the hell did he mess this up so badly? It is like he hit the fast forward button on his whole movie, with zero dialogue or battle scenes having any semblance of pacing. There is absolutely no way to connect with the characters or get your dopamine hit from the bloodshed because nothing in this movie ever lasts for more than a few moments. To illustrate, let’s go setpiece by setpiece, as their failures are indicative of the film’s missteps as a whole.

Paul Mescal is good in this movie. He’s intense and has pretty decent line delivery considering the dumb shit he is tasked with saying. We meet him at a pretty sick fortress in Numidia, and this siege setpiece starts off promising. Much time is given to catapults and drums before the ships arrive at their destination and jump the wall to enter the battle in hand-to-hand bloodshed. Pascal and Mescal are both convincing in this combat, but the battle, problematically, only lasts for 2 minutes worth of swordfighting before a character gets knocked out and the scene cuts out. It feels like the ultimate blue balling of Ridley Scott’s best talent in large scale battles. A lazy waste of what could have been an all-timer Ridley Scott extended war sequence.

We next get the first gladiator fight featuring the highly-anticipated baboons! I was excited for this one and I shouldn’t have been. Despite Mescal being game to bite and scream at a baboon, we do not see anyone else fighting their other baboons, and as a result, the whole thing cheesily feels like it solely hinges on Mescal defeating his baboon for some reason. When Mescal scares his off and then kills it, the rest seemingly freeze, and it’s just bad moviemaking. It’s like the filmmakers forgot about or didn’t know what to do with all of the other baboons and men in the arena. We never see another one interacting with a gladiator outside of one idiot getting his neck ripped open. Lame.

Then there’s the fight in the royal halls, which I will admit is actually pretty solid. Mescal goes full savage again and this time he has a more worthy opponent, which will not return for the rest of the film, as our main character enjoys a nice shot of steroids or something that makes him incredibly, boringly overpowered from here on out. Anyways, here Mescal’s Lucius kills some big dumb stooge they bring in via flowerpot, sword, fist. It’s pretty fun and there’s a ton of blood. Thumbs up.

But they come right back with another stinker. The rhino fight. The guy on the rhino is for some reason super outmatched. They include other gladiators in the fight for seemingly no reason than for one to be gored. You never really worry about any of them because A, you never get to meet the other gladiators like you did in the original movie, and B, the guy on the rhino sucks at his job. He gets defeated so easily. One of the best things about the first movie is how constant of a sense of danger and tension is present. That never happens in this one. It’s like they didn’t care about the execution because they were so enamored with the ideas of these fights. But if they were so excited, wouldn’t they have been disappointed with the end results being this lukewarm?

Then, the naval battle. This should, on paper, be one of the best, most exciting setpieces of 2020s filmmaking at large. The Coliseum is filled with water and sharks, and Ridley Scott is in charge of the direction? It does not get much better than that… Or so you would think. There is for some reason zero buildup whatsoever to this scene. Nobody bats an eye at the fact that they are getting on a boat to do battle in the world’s most terrifying arena. It’s just another Saturday for them. There is a moment in the original movie where a guy pisses his pants. Another where Maximus educates everyone on strategy for how to defeat their enemies. Both moments are met with extreme contention from adversaries trying to and succeeding in killing many of our heroes. Those moments just don’t happen here. The naval battle lasts for three minutes before Mescal and co. stupidly give up the high ground to jump onto the other boat and then set it on fire and win without almost any resistance. It sucks, it has zero interest in tension nor teamwork nor military tactics, and it’s over before you can blink.

Then we get to what could have been the emotional highpoint of the movie. After a sick tracking walkout shot of Pedro Pascal’s Acacius entering the arena to fight some Praetorians, he dispatches of them in little more than 3 seconds. Too quick. Maximus was always more of an underdog and that’s why that first movie works so well. It’s not fun if everyone can kill with one swing of the blade. Lucius comes out next to meet Acacius and this is what you’ve seen in the trailer. It should be epic and filled with dread. And again, it lasts for just a few seconds, with a frankly hilarious ending. Equally hilarious and frustrating.

That’s pretty much it, with one more fight literally and figuratively wearing so much plot and budget armor that I laughed out loud. One character defeats multiple stabs with his breastplate while the whole thing ends with two armies looking like they want to fight and then just deciding, “Nah.” It feels like they ran out of budget. To aspiring filmmakers, I beg of you, please never do this. This is literally the worst thing you can do in a movie like this.

So those are the setpieces/combat sequences, which I was anticipating the most of all of the movie’s elements. I also wanted to mention a few stray thoughts:

The Pedro Pascal/Connie Nielsen scenes feel like they were ripped out of an episode of Fairy Tale Theater, right down to the maid listening sinisterly in the background. There is such a cheap soap opera feel to all of their dialogue, and I can’t entirely tell if the melodrama stems from the dialogue or if they were directed strangely or what but it is laughable. For as awesome and convincing as Pascal is any time he is asked to use a sword or say something portentous, his scheming with Nielsen is the movie’s most strange and painful blunder. When those characters complete their arcs late in the film, it gets worse. The ways that Scarpa chooses to fulfill their characters are two of the most awkward and unsatisfying moments in the film. Pure, unchecked melodrama… Something that the first movie completely avoided.

On a more positive note, I want to reiterate that pretty much everyone else gives a good performance. Nobody gets enough time…too many characters, but everyone is doing their best. I even liked the psychotic twin emperors, who understood the assignment. Since Gucci, I’ve enjoyed Ridley allowing actors to get as weird and over-the-top as they want—it makes for fun moviewatching.

There are so many speeches in this movie to mass audiences and there is just no way that anyone would hear them. Hilarious.

To sum it all up, I feel like one of the many subjects that Rome has. In the words of Pedro Pascal’s Acacius, I must be fed. This felt like the Weight Watchers-approved, malnourished version of the big brassy meal we should have been served.

4.5/10