In the Flesh: Gladiator 2

Never show me Matt Lucas. There is no reason good enough to show me Matt Lucas. He radiates an anti-charisma so powerful that even casting him perfectly as the shrieking, freakish mouthpiece of a dying empire isn’t enough to make his onscreen presence tolerable. Between his presence and the woefully miscast Paul Mescal as the adult Lucius, there are serious weak links peppered throughout Gladiator 2’s cast. Denzel Washington does a great job as charmingly disillusioned fight promoter and arms dealer Macrinus, a charismatic former slave angling to seize control of the crumbling Roman empire. His natural affability and frankly dazzling smile go a long way, though at times the character’s brutal realism seems calculated to blunt or invalidate his accurate assessment of Rome’s character. As is typical of Scott’s worst instincts, the film balks at any real political analysis, preferring instead to remain in the realm of inspiring speeches about non-specific ideals like freedom and justice.

And speaking of Scott’s faults, Gladiator 2 is easily his least colorful film, so desaturated that even its most beautifully lit and composed shots feel lifeless. Sterile. The film also lingers too long in close-up and at medium, eschewing the wide shots that made the original film feel so sweeping in scope. With Mescal unable to bring so much as a fraction of Crowe’s gravitas to the screen and the editing and visual prowess that gave Gladiator such a feeling of momentum and spectacle nowhere in evidence, there’s precious little reason for the sequel film to exist at all. There are a few pleasures, to be sure. The rhinoceros scene is pulse-pounding and exhilarating, the shots of the courtyard at the villa of Acacius (Pedro Pascal, almost criminally handsome here) and his wife Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) are vibrantly alive with birds, insects, and a feeling of genuine life, and Acacius’s trial by combat in which he defeats four men by the skin of his teeth is a razor-sharp piece of fight choreography, but they’re slim pickings in the shadow of two and a half hours of tedium.

Scott’s original film took a little time to flesh out the gladiators fighting alongside Maximus, enough so that it mattered to us whether they lived or died. Gladiator 2 takes no such pains, and seems to have little interest in the common people it repeatedly invokes. Like many of Scott’s historical epics, the text is troubled by his ill-defined liberal beliefs and fear of political thought. We learn that Macrinus was owned and ill-treated by Marcus Aurelius, the man whose “dream that was Rome” is our thematic throughline across both films, but we end with Lucius invoking that same dream to prevent a clash between the Praetorian Guard and Acacius’s avenging legion. The sight of so many thousands of men moving in formation across the farmland and plains of Italy is the last real visual joy the film has to offer us, and like so much else about Gladiator 2, it sputters out without doing anything interesting. Add to this Fred Hechinger and Joseph Quinn doing cheap, gayed-up imitations of Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus and you have a recipe for a truly unremarkable film.