Gladiator II Made Me Lose Hope
This sequel represents everything wrong with current movie-making, and the fact that it's receiving even mildly positive reviews is baffling beyond belief.
Why has “good enough” become acceptable?
On the walk back from a recent viewing of Gladiator II, my wife asked me if I was angry at her. I wasn't, and very rarely am. But I was acting particularly pissy. After examining my feelings, I realized that the sequel had put me in a particularly horrific mood. Everything about it was laughable - I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen anything so phoned in.
What irks me is that “it’s obviously no Gladiator I, but still, it had its moments!” - the resounding critical consensus - is somehow enough to get this thing a fresh rating. But it was not fresh - it fucking stunk. Can we start expecting a bit more from our $310,000,000 movies por favor?
We’re supposed to know this guy!
Lots of spoilers ahead here. The start of Gladiator II shows Hanno, played by Paul Mescal, feeding chickens and passionately making out with his wife Arishat, played by Yuval Gonen. That’s the character development - he’s a cool, regular dude who makes out and feeds chickens. But then! The horns sound, they’re under attack, and his flawless, chicken-feeding, chick-kissing world comes to a sudden end…
In the next scene, he is inexplicably cast as the leader of his army. His wife is also a badass warrior, which we know because they’re smiling and cracking jokes as their city comes under siege. They’re both wearing sexy armor.
This is the character development. ~45 seconds of his normal world. And then, here comes Pedro Pascal and his fleet of ships, which look like a loading screen from a 1995 CD-ROM computer game. The CGI in this movie is horrible, yet it’s pretty much the least offensive thing about Gladiator II.
After a minute of terribly-done trebuchet volleys that don’t accomplish anything, Pedro Pascal and his Roman army start storming over the walls. Seconds earlier, there were about 800 archers aiming at them - but once Pedro runs in, helmet off, and consequences vanish. Pedro doesn’t get shot because he’s a main character and we know who he is.
Now we witness some sword fighting, plagued by incessant, insane jump-cuts. I swear to god - I’m not sure there’s a single shot of someone even swinging their sword all the way through in this movie. Someone raises their sword above their head, CUT TO a sword swinging down CUT TO blood spraying and a guy flying backwards CUT TO the guy who apparently swung the sword looking at a new enemy CUT TO another sword swinging mid-air, etc. How the hell did this cost $310,000,000? Every fight scene reminded me of THIS VIDEO.
My wife is dead and now it’s revenge time.
Arishat gets shot by an arrow, his army loses, and now he’s pissed. I’d be pissed if someone killed my wife with an arrow too. The problem is that I don’t know who the fuck this guy is or care about him, at all.
Remember in the original Gladiator, when we spend half an hour with Maximus establishing his honor and relationships, riveted by incredible acting and dialogue? Then he’s cruelly and unfairly betrayed by a father-killing psychopath? Then he saves his own life during an absolutely unreal action sequence, charges injured through the countryside on his horse to discover his wife and son hanging and burned at the hands of his betrayer?
Fuck that! In Gladiator II, we just need to understand that Arishat was great, and so is Hanno, and he needs revenge because he’s the Main Character. John Wick spent 15 minutes establishing the relationship between Keanu Reaves and his puppy. In Gladiator II, we get less than a minute.
But we REALLY know who this guy is…
But here’s the thing: we don’t need character development. Because over the course of the movie, we find out that Hanno is actually Lucius, the grandson of Marcus Aurelius and rightful heir to the throne! So - in a way, we watched him grow up already, in that previous movie that was really good. Remember Gladiator?
This twist is telegraphed so hard that it’s not a twist. My wife, who’d never even seen the first Gladiator, leaned over to me about 7 minutes into the movie and said “this dude is the son of the original gladiator, right?” Correct. This unsurprising news is all we need to know - the guy has character development flowing through his veins, genetically!
It was the same goddamn movie, but so, so much worse.
If you fed ChatGTP a synopsis of Gladiator, and had it write a script, this would be the first draft. Everything in this movie is the same as the first movie, characters, plot beats, and all.
Denzel Washington is Oliver Reed. Paul Mescal is Russell Crowe. Joseph Quinn and Paul Hechinger are Juaquin Phoenix split in two, with syphilis and a monkey thrown in. And the repeat characters do exactly the same things in the same order.
Hanno / Lucius is now a slave who must fight as a gladiator. So we see him in multiple fights, except instead of brilliantly choreographed battle sequences, we get him fighting a monkey, a rhinoceros, and a swimming pool full of sharks. What the fuck? Perhaps, instead of CGI mega-apes, we could have seen a 4-second fight sequence without a jump cut.
Hanno defies the emperor(s) numerous times, but they keep him alive because he’s the main character. We see the unhinged emperor(s) acting increasingly unhinged. The only good parts of the original Gladiator are replaced by laughably inept substitutions. Pedro Pascal actually isn’t a bad guy - he’s a really good guy! So he gets killed by some random archers (who star prominently in this movie threatening Colosseum audience members with drawn bows on about 85 occasions). The emperor(s) aren’t killed by Hanno - they’re both killed by Denzel Washington, who’s also a bad guy. There is one new thing: we get to see Denzel walk around and play with Joseph Quinn’s very (very) poorly-made wax head. The entire theater was laughing during this entire scene. But the Senate isn’t upset by his head play, because he’s a main character and apparently it’s just a thing that happens.
The final blow.
The big showdown in the movie comes when Hanno / Lucius fights Denzel at the gates of Rome. Strange, considering that Hanno is supposed to be the greatest fighter on the fucking planet, and Denzel is a slave trader and businessman who we haven’t seen fight before. But Denzel gives Paul a serious run for his money! In the end, thank the Gods, Hanno comes out on top.
Now, as the Roman army and the rebel Roman army line up, sure to slaughter each other by the thousands, Hanno really steps into his hero shoes. “Too much bloodshed!” he yells to both armies. The armies are spread over literally thousands of yards, and he has no loudspeaker, so it’s impossible that even 3% of these guys heard a word he said, but they all cheer in unison! Hell yeah! This guy can orate!
Most hilarious about this final scene is that none of these soldiers would have any fucking clue who Hanno is, yet they all stand around watching him kill Denzel Washington, who they also don’t know, and then eagerly listen to his speech and completely agree with everything he says.
Remember: we know who Hanno is. He’s the son of Maximus! He’s the main character, for Christ’s sake! But the generals and soldiers watching him are just seeing a completely random dude giving a speech after murdering a businessman, and that’s enough for them to put down their swords and sing in unison.
And one more thing.
I might have walked out only mildly annoyed if it weren’t for the very last scene. After the movie ends, we’re shown Russell Crowe’s hands lightly brushing wheat as he walks through the fields of the afterlife. The actual footage from the end of Gladiator.
Remember that? Remember that scene? Remember how moved you were after that really good movie, Gladiator, when they show that at the end? Well - after watching this absolute disgrace of a movie, we want to remind you that it was connected to the good movie you saw twenty years ago, so here’s that scene. God damn was that scene powerful, in that good movie you watched.
This turned my disappointment into blood-curdling rage. You cannot do that. We all knew this movie was a merciless cash-grab, but the fucking gaul to just take the final shot from a good movie and glue it to the end of this garbage is absolutely unreal. Like sticking the final frame of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at the end of Expend4bles. I’m still reeling.
We deserve so much better than this. The actors are all first-rate, Ridley Scott is a legend, and the budget was enormous, and yet this is what we ended up with. I know we can do better.