Gladiator II: Thumbs Down

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Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down) — Jean-Léon Gérôme (1872)

Let’s start with a game. See if you can guess which movie I’m describing:

We open with a big action set piece. The Romans taking on the barbarian hordes; the former obviously and easily win. In the battle’s aftermath a noble warrior is made a slave. He’s a reluctant gladiator, but soon becomes the best, fuelled as he is by vengeance for his murdered wife. While he’s winning a series of gladiatorial fights, each more improbable than the last, political intrigue grips Rome as a doomed plot to overthrow a malevolent emperor (or two) gathers pace.

If you guessed the original Gladiator, congratulations. If you guessed Gladiator II, congratulations. The first two hours of the sequel follow pretty much beat-for-beat the exact same storyline as the first. Except worse.

Before the film came out much hay was made in the press about its historical inaccuracies, and while many of them are completely ludicrous — gladiators riding rhinos; great white sharks swimming a flooded Colosseum; weird mutant-looking baboons tearing apart slaves in the ring¹ — these alone do not ruin a film.

After all, the original Gladiator took its fair share of historical liberties. Marcus Aurelius never intended to return Rome to a republic; he very much wanted his unfit son Commodus to succeed him. Commodus himself was way worse a man in real life than he’s portrayed in the film, and of course he wasn’t killed in the Colosseum by a gladiator — in fact, he was supposedly a great fighter who won as many as 620 gladiatorial contests (according to his own writings anyway). And this is without mentioning the fact that Russell Crowe’s character is preposterously named Maximus, which is an adjective (meaning ‘largest’), not a name. They might as well have called him Biggus Dickus.

Director Ridley Scott has made it pretty clear that he doesn’t give a damn about historical inaccuracies, telling a reporter last year to “Get a life, mate”, when asked about the fictions in Napoleon. He’s right that audiences don’t watch films for accuracy; we watch to be entertained. Yet, it’s precisely this that’s been missing in his last few films.

Napoleon contained a few shots that looked spectacular, but had little interesting between them, skimming over the one-time Emperor of the French’s life so quickly that we were left with little more than a surface-level Kinetoscope of a film. Gladiator II was equally bad, but in a different way. In addition to pond-skating from big-action-set-piece to big-action-set-piece, it also decided to do away with any notion of originality at all, just rehashing the entire plot of the first movie down to the most minute details, along with much of the original dialogue too. When the film does finally diverge for the last thirty minutes or so, it gets worse, and even then you feel no stakes at all because you don’t actually believe (or care) that things won’t work out, even as the characters repeat all same mistakes from the first movie (stop telling everyone about the secret plot!).

The performances are more mixed. Denzel Washington is great, as always, and looked like he was having a great time in every scene. Pedro Pascal was also good, but had little to do. Notable mention to Joseph Quinn too, who really sells the deranged, effete emperor character. I like Paul Mescal, but he lacks the gravitas of Russell Crowe, and his British accent seemed to make him rather wooden. (I don’t know why they couldn’t just have had him speak in his native Irish accent; it’s not like Romans spoke the Queen’s English either.) Connie Nielsen returns but seems to have left her acting skills behind in the early noughties — though to be fair to her, it would be hard for anyone to deliver such cringe-inducing dialogue well. Tim McInnerny was fun, but almost every other minor character was entirely forgettable or really boring.

Of course, this was all entirely predictable.

Over the last few years, it feels like Ridley Scott, and Hollywood more widely, have taken on the role of Maximus in his first gladiatorial battle. They deliver the beats on the surface — blood, death, well-worn plot points — and then bay at the shocked crowd, “ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!” It’s as if they’re saying, “We know what cretinous, mindless creatures like you enjoy — here’s the big action stunts, here’s the blood and gore, here’s the emotional music. Yeah, you like that don’t you…” Who needs something as insignificant as an original story when you have a thousand properties to remake, a thousand clichés to rehash, a thousand unwanted sequels to release?

Please don’t mistake me for a cultural reactionary. I’m not saying they don’t make good movies anymore, because they do. But I am a history nerd, and thus I am a sucker for a historical epic. I’m not even asking for the films to be 100% accurate! Just give me a good story!² Why remake Gladiator when you could make, say, a film about Nero, or the Punic Wars, or the sack of Jerusalem! As a kingdom, republic, or empire, Rome lasted over a thousand years (depending on how you count it) — surely we can find other interesting stories to tell! It’s not like there’s no market for it — last year men’s obsession with the Roman Empire went viral for months!

It’s annoying that this comes at a time when Hollywood keeps talking about how it’s under greater pressure than ever before. With declines in cinema-going, no DVD sales to count on, and competition for attention from streaming, YouTube, and TikTok, apparently less original movies are being made than ever before. Unless it’s a remake or sequel of a successful franchise, it’s extremely hard to get anything made. But it’s hard to feel sympathy when they seem so intent on feeding us sh*t sandwiches packaged under the brands of our most beloved franchises. Gladiator II is going to have to go in the same mental compartment as the Star Wars sequels and Rings of Power, where I pretend they are crap, non-canonical fan-fiction and nothing more.

In truth, this is all our own fault. If we didn’t keep turning out for these sequels and remakes then they would stop making them. Apparently Gladiator III is already in the works — the best option is just to never see it.

Are you not entertained? No, Ridley. I am not.

1. In fact, the most annoying inaccuracy in Gladiator II is the scene where Tim McInnerny’s character is inexplicably sitting in a café (establishments which didn’t exist until the 15th century), drinking coffee (16th century) or tea (16th century), reading a newspaper (16th century). Though they’re really dumb you could at least argue the other fictions at least offer a spectacle, but the café scene adds nothing at all except a feeling that the filmmakers couldn’t give two Fs about the period they’re supposed to be portraying, or us, the audience, for that matter.

2. While we’re on the subject, here’s my unsolicited opinion on the last few decades’ worth of historical epics. Good: Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, Last of the Mohicans, Last Samurai, The King. Mid: Troy, Master and Commander. Bad: Braveheart, Napoleon, Gladiator 2, Alexander, Robin Hood, King Arthur (both Fuqua’s and Guy Ritchie’s versions), 300: 2.