Gladiator II has broken the hype meter charts. Sequel to a best picture winner, with same director, a new, smoking hot young cast, and one of the greatest actors of all time, Denzel Washington! This is bro heaven and internet boyfriend fantasy. The key to a movie stew this spicy is to not let the spices overwhelm the flavor. Is that even possible with all these spices? Let’s see…
Our hero in this Gladiator, Hanno (Paul Mescal) is outside the Roman empire, living in Numidia, happily married to his wife Arishat (Yuval Gonen). Another wrong place, wrong time though, as General Acacius (Pedro Pascal) is about to sack the capital, taking the city for Rome’s twin emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger). Hanno is captured, and sold into slavery, where he is bought by Macrinus (Denzel Washington), an independent businessman and power player behind the scenes in Roman politics. Macrinus strikes an uneasy deal with Hanno: be his instrument in the Gladiator arena, and Macrinus will find a way to get General Acacius into the arena for Hanno to deliver his form of justice.
Gladiator II’s heights are as good as anything else in 2024. A couple of the Mescal battle sequences, specifically the opening one and one in the throne room of the two emperors, are big and little examples of how to stage a battle sequence that Ridley has been mastering throughout his career. Most of GII’s heights, somewhat surprisingly though, are outside the battles in the Roman Colosseum. Denzel Washington is Ridley Scott’s instrument here, making a whole lot of choices that work everytime he’s in a scene. He’s paired a lot with Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger, who also give Denzel what he needs to make the movie cook as the power board keeps shifting. Denzel takes things we inevitably like about him but puts really weird spins on them, yanking the audience out of our default “blanket supportive” of Washington into something more mercurial, as we lean in and figure out more. We get more and more of Denzel as the movie goes along too, as the actor, like a gladiator, simply takes control of the film that was spinning a bunch of other plates and stories.
But while Denzel is electrifying the audience, that’s only about 1/3 ish of the story. Those other 2 plots are also juicy: Hanno’s tale of revenge and how good people try to clean Rome from it’s corrupted state. Ridley essentially starts them all at the beginning, content to have the actors battle for the best to win out. Because we don’t get enough time to develop any of the characters necessary for those 2 more complex plots to grow, they never fully mature into something interesting, and fall into secondary status, choked out by Denzel’s scheming. And since the Denzel storyline has very little emotional heft to it (just entertainment and dark comedy), Gladiator II never builds to anything, and frequently gets lost along the way jumping from character to character as if Ridley just remembered they were in the movie too. We eventually find and ending, but only after ham fisting in Rise of Skywalker level “fan service” meant to emotionally win the audience over, not quite understanding why audiences went to see the movie in the first place.
So that’s the end result of Gladiator II: a popcorn movie and nothing else. Around Thanksgiving, amidst a bleak, dark movie year, I guess that’s a fine result of a spicy stew. But the morning after effects will leave your stomach feeling a bit queasy, wondering why you at the stew to begin with. That’s it: this isn’t a stew: it’s a White Castle Crave Case! Ok, Thanksgiving’s got my mind too deep into food thoughts, I’m sorry about that.