GLADIATOR II (2024) *** ½

I’m not sure why it took Ridley Scott two decades to come up with a sequel to Gladiator, especially when the plot is essentially “The Same Shit That Happened to Maximus Happens to His Son”, but we finally got one.  I guess Hollywood didn’t have the balls to go with that Nick Cave script where Maximus literally goes to Hell.  Oh well. 

Paul Mescal stars as Lucius, the son of Maximus, who is imprisoned by the Roman Empire and is made a slave.  He impresses slave master Macrinus (Denzel Washington) in his first fight where he battles a CGI monkey to the death.  Macrinus buys him and puts him in the Colosseum to fight for his freedom and a chance to kill the man who murdered his wife.  Problems arise when he learns his sworn enemy has married his mother (Connie Nielsen).  Eventually, Lucius learns that Macrinus is using him as a pawn in a grander scheme. 

Mescal is OK in the lead.  He registers just fine during his action scenes, but overall is kind of bland.  I’ll resist the temptation to compare him to the original’s Russell Crowe as those are some big shoes to fill.  It’s just that for a movie so wild and colorful, he kind of gets lost in the shuffle.  Pedro Pascal (doing a Mark Ruffalo impression) fares slightly better as the Roman general who has taken Lucius’ mother’s hand in marriage.  Nielsen is also quite good.  It looks like she hasn’t aged a day since her appearance in the first film. 

It’s Denzel though who steals the movie.  He’s highly entertaining and looks like he’s having a ball playing such a heel.  He stops short of chewing scenery and mustache twirling, but his sinister energy is a huge boost to the film. 

The scenes in the Colosseum are over the top and sometime borderline ridiculous.  That by the way, is not a critique.  It’s as if director Ridley Scott is nudging the audience and saying “Hey, remember the scene with the tiger in the first one?  Guess how we’re gonna top that?  How’s a pack of wild monkeys sound?  A charging rhino?  I KNOW!  What about SHARKS!?!”  Clearly, Ridley took Maximus’ maxim, “Are you not entertained?” to heart when it came up to dreaming up ludicrous bullshit for this sequel.  But what highly entertaining ludicrous bullshit it is. 

Washington gets the best line when he says, “Rage pours out of you like milk from a whore’s tit!”