Gladiator II (2024) – Review

In an era of impressively belated legacy sequels, you’d think it would be tough to surprise me with yet another, sudden return of a cinematic world that had long fallen into shadows and dust – however, even I didn’t see Gladiator II coming. I mean, considering that Ridley Scott seems to be in the midst of the most productive spell of his career at the sprightly young age of 86 and that he’s already revisited the Alien franchise he created twice, I guess a return to the bloody honour of the Roman Colosseum shouldn’t have seemed so strange.
So around 24 years after the first film managed to singlehandedly bring a dead genre back to life and nabbed a bunch of Oscars for its troubles, Scott has taken us back to the time where politics and having a man fight a tiger to the death went hand in hand as yet another gladiator is lined up to violently call a tyrant on their bullshit. But considering that Gladiator is considered a stone cold classic and one of the best of its kind, could the existence of a sequel possibly hope to avoid a downturned thumb?

It’s been over twenty years since general turned slave turned gladiator, Maximus Decimus Meridius gave his life in the arena, vanquishing the tyrant Commodus and thus hopefully giving Rome a shot of being a republic that exists to serve the people. However, we find that Rome is still fully in its tyrant phase as its now being ruled by a couple of spiteful, psychotic, power hungry brothers named Geta and Caracalla who send their world weary general, Marcus Acacius, to march out and claim more kingdoms for them to own. However, one of these kingdoms contains Lucius, a man with a complicated history who only desires to live a quiet life with his beloved wife, but when Acacius’ army moves in and conquers, he finds himself a slave after his wife is killed whole fighting in battle.
Consumed with rage over a fallen spouse and itching to take bloody revenge of Acacius, Lucius soon finds himself owned by the opportunistic Macrinus, a former slave turned gladiator owner who realises that his new acquisition could be immensely valuable when it comes to accumulating the power he needs to pull off an audacious master plan. Of course, Lucius cares about none of this and is more than happy to be used as a weapon of mass distraction as he undergoes more and more outlandish battles in the Colosseum in front of baying crowds – but when he isn’t fending off rabid baboons, dodging jacked-up rhinos or generally being a lean, mean limb-slicing machine, he finds that his long ignored past is starting to catch up to him.
You see, we’ve met Lucuis before when he was a little boy who looked up to Maximus as his mother, Lucilla, watched and soon realises that he himself has a right to the throne of Rome – but two major issues continue to cloud his judgement: one is that he hates Rome and the other, well… his mother is now the beloved wife of General Marcus Acacius. Hmmmm, awkward.

So I don’t think I’m shocking anyone too much when I say that Gladiator II doesn’t quite match the majestic heights of Gladiator; but that doesn’t mean you should take that as a snub to the latest result of Ridley Scott’s near inhuman work ethic. For a start, the original Gladiator is near unsurpassed in the genre of modern historical epics and even without its clutch of Oscars, the movie still remains as iconic as hell, with Russell Crowe’s gravelly speech to his enemy being as iconic as they come, so the issue isn’t that Gladiator II is somehow bad, but rather that Gladiator I is just too good.
However, to just blindly compare the two is just an exercise in futility. Yes, if you compare Paul Mescal’s brooding Lucius with Crowe’s far more magnetic Maximus, or Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger’s screeching, ginger villains to Joaquin Phoenix’s preening and complex Commodus, the sequel is always going to come up second best to the original that’s been beloved for over twenty years – but why would you actively go out of your way to deny yourself the truth that Gladiator II is still a rip-roaring sequel that serves just as much bang for your denarii. Yes, the journey isn’t as enrapturing and the plot quite as majestic, but there are other things to keep you locked in place.

The first of these is Scott himself, who not only once again anoints himself as the crowned king of the modern historical epic (not hard when it seems like he’s the only one bloody making them), but his sense of scale and his vision seems to be getting stronger than ever as he opens with a stonking navel battle and then proceeds to blow our minds with a string of confrontations in various areas which takes the action sequences from the first movie and pumps them full of go-juice. When Mescal’s rapidly more battered hero isn’t fending off an attack from a gaggle of shaved, throat tearing, CGI baboons, we’re goggling in amazement as a swaggering gladiator enters seated astride a rhino and this isn’t even the most outrageous sight that Scott has in store as he has the arena flooded and filled with killer sharks as the fighters desperately cling to life as they enact a full on navel battle for the crowd. If Scott can’t quite equal the majesty of Gladiator, he certainly matches and expands on the scale.
While everyone involved in front of the camera are content to go with the flow, be it a sense of measured stoicism – via Mescal, Pedro Pascal or a returning Connie Nielsen – or a spot of overacting – over to you Quinn and a sex disease addled Hechinger – which fits the piece nicely; however, stepping up and virtually bundling the entire movie under his arm is Denzel Washington, whose performance as the scheming Macrinus somehow proves to singlehandedly equal the crazed visuals that Scott is so effortlessly delivering. Striding around the place, weighed down with extravagant robes and flashy bling and uttering such lines as “I must have power” while fiddling with a severed human head, Denzel just goes to town on the script and you can tell he’s relishing playing another morally vapid string puller arguably for the first time since Training Day. To put it simply, he’s glorious and seeing as the man has recently announced a countdown on his retirement, it’s all the more reason to embrace his performance even tighter while he’s still in the business.

Big, bold, bloody and brilliant, Gladiator II might not carry its excesses with the same dignity as it’s predecessor but it certainly works hard at creating enough connective tissue to stand as a fun and aggressive sequel to a beloved classic. Is the ending a bit too abrupt to be wholly satisfying? A bit, but a third instalment is in the planning phase so that might get sorted somewhere down the line – but when it comes to watching the movie on the biggest screen possible and feeling the rush as the crowd roars at a sliced artery or a gored midsection, Scott’s handle on the sword and sandal epic remains fairly undiminished.
Are we are still entertained? Definitely.
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