Nearly 25 years after Gladiator pulled in an impressive $465m at the Box office from a budget of just over $100m, Ridley Scott finally unveils his much-anticipated sequel. Gladiator 2 – in one form or another – has been languishing in Development Hell for years, and various ideas have been tossed around, but eventually, it clearly became obvious that the best way to make a sequel was just to cut and paste the first film and tell pretty much the same story all over again but with some weird CGI baboons and a random shark attack sequence thrown in to appeal to an audience that likes its fantasy films – even ones with one foot in historical accuracy – with a bit more oomph. Surprisingly, it works rather well, possibly because it all seems quite familiar. If the script and storyline are a bit on the anaemic side, there’s plenty of decapitation, limb removal and general slicing and dicing and blood-letting to keep up the interest when the pseudo-historical histrionics threaten to become a bit wearing.
24 years after the events of Gladiator and old Maximus Decimus Meridious’s son Lucius (Paul Mescal), is trying to live a quiet life in Numidia under the name Hanno with his wife Arishat. When the Roman Army invades the city led by General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal, inevitably), Lucius finds himself taken into slavery and forced to fight CGI baboons. This feat earns him the attention and approval of arms dealer Macrinus (Denzel Washington), who passes him over to his assistant Viggo so he can be trained to become…wait for it…a gladiator! Macrinus quickly promises Lucius revenge against Acacius, but Macrinus has his own plans and ambitions and over the film’s generous yet rather sprightly running time, we’re treated to a number of eye-popping battle sequences and extended fights all wound around a circuitous but easily navigable plotline involving corruption, betrayal, duplicity, agonised familial relationships and every other Roman era cliché you can imagine.
Gladiator 2 isn’t as stately as its predecessor, mainly because it’s very much more of the same. It’s a film best seen on the biggest possible screen because the spectacle is genuinely stunning – even in these CGI-doused days – and if Paul Mescal is rather bland as Lucius (and he is), then at least we’ve got Denzel Washington to revel in as he chews up and spits out every scene as the scheming, Machiavellian Macrinus, a sly and spry Roman bad guy with distinctly 21st-century sensibilities. Gladiator 2 is great fun, a treat for the eyes and ears with no readily discernible intellectual aspirations, and that’s as it should be. Ridley Scott is well into his 80s now, and it’s frankly astonishing that he’s still able to pull together a film of this scale and deliver it with such gusto and on-screen fire and energy. It’s bonkers, but in a very good way, indeed.
GLADIATOR II is in UK cinemas now and is released in the US on November 22nd.
