Movie Review: “Gladiator II”

It’s a solid piece of neoclassical popcorn, with Denzel Washington taking command as the villain, but it’s ultimately a mere shadow of “Gladiator.”

MPA rating: R. Running time: 148 MIN.

by Owen Glieberman

It may not be high praise, but “Gladiator II,” the sequel to Ridley Scott’s landmark slash-and-burn ancient Rome spectacular, is probably about as good a movie as we could have expected it to be. Written by David Scarpa (“Napoleon”) and directed by Scott (who, at 86, hasn’t lost his touch for the peacock pageantry of teeming masses thirsting for blood), the movie is a solid piece of neoclassical popcorn — a serviceable epic of brutal warfare, Colosseum duels featuring lavish decapitations and beasts both animal and human, along with the middlebrow “decadence” of palace intrigue.

The whole film is tailored to the next-generation specifications of its star, Paul Mescal, who plays a descendant of Russell Crowe’s Maximus (I won’t say more) and does it by not trying to imitate Crowe’s performance. In “Gladiator,” Crowe, wielding a sword that was like an extension of his inner hostility, was the ultimate thinking person’s badass. Mescal, svelte and placid, comes on more like the disheveled son of Marlon Brando — a forlorn pussycat turned rager.

Twenty-four years ago, “Gladiator” was bracingly old and new at the same time: a hyperviolent literate action movie rooted in the theatrical antiquity of Hollywood’s past and rendered with the (then-novel) VFX of the future. With “Gladiator II,” we go in knowing more or less what we’re getting, but the film still stands strikingly apart from the blockbuster marketplace. It’s a Saturday-night epic of tony escapism. But is it great? A movie to love the way that some of us love “Gladiator”? No and no. It’s ultimately a mere shadow of that movie. But it’s just diverting enough to justify its existence.

At the beginning, we learn that Rome is being ruled by twin-brother emperors, the fey Geta (Joseph Quinn) and the even more fey Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), who with their pale smirks are like hermaphrodites out of “Fellini Satyricon.” The overstuffed Roman empire is metastasizing into sordid bloodshed and debauchery. When an armada of Roman battle ships, led by the idealistic General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), shows up to conquer the North African province of Numidia, it’s a rout. One of those killed is the soldier wife of farmer-turned-troop-leader Lucius Verus (Mescal), which sends him into a momentary tailspin of despair.

That stands in marked contrast to the primal wound experienced by Crowe’s Maximus in “Gladiator,” where the slaughter of his wife and son scalds him so harshly that he considers himself already dead. That’s part of the poetic power of “Gladiator”: Maximus is now prepared to join them in heaven, which liberates his already considerable ferocity. He wants revenge, so much so that on a deep level he does not give a fuck.

Crowe, in “Gladiator,” gave one of my favorite performances in cinema (I’ve watched it a dozen times). That’s because he played a variation on something we’ve all seen so often — the seething hard case wired to kill — yet invested it with such uncanny soul. His squint spoke volumes. His physicality was existential. And when he lowered his voice to say to Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus, “The time for honoring yourself will soon be at an end” (translation: I would like to carve out your eyeballs with my thumbs), he was more invincible in his silent fury than any superhero.

Paul Mescal doesn’t have anything approaching that elemental masculine gravitas. His Lucius, who is captured and brought to Rome to be a gladiator, is sulky and pensive, with a quizzical look. His stare is sensitive, his grin rueful, his lower jaw juts. But Mescal has something that works for the movie — he projects not revenge but a shaggy rugged nobility, the idealism that will make Lucius the potential savior of Rome.

First, though, he must survive in the gladiatorial arena, which he does by taking on a team of wild monkeys (who seem like they’re from another planet, which is strange) and drawing the attention of Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a former slave who runs the gladiator bullpen and becomes Lucius’s mentor. Washington’s performance is the film’s wild card, because you can’t pin him down — he’s a gregarious good guy, then a Machiavellian mover cadging gossip from senators, then a backstabber, then someone who will stab you anywhere and everywhere. You can feel Washington drawing on his Shakespearean knowledge to layer this character into a succulent real-world vision of ambitious evil.

Lucius first thinks that his enemy is Pascal’s Acacius, who led the charge that killed Lucius’s wife. But Acacius is actually a decent chap who stands apart from where Rome is heading. He’s plotting a coup against the emperors and has the senators, like Derek Jacobi’s Gracchus, onboard.

If there’s a relationship that carries “Gladiator II,” it’s the one between Lucius and his mother, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), who sent him away from Rome as a boy after the death of Maximus. The two have a few issues to work out, and Nielsen’s acting has acquired a tremulous bite. The way Macrinus rises up, driven by Washington’s formidable flair, lends the movie some structural surprise. What’s less surprising — downright sequel dutiful, in fact — is Lucius’s late-stage embrace of Maximus’s moxie and his literal suit of armor. The way Mescal plays him, with an anger that never quite simmers to a boil, we now can’t help but see him as a millennial knockoff of Crowe’s glowering royal punk. At “Gladiator II,” are we not entertained? We are. But that’s not necessarily the same as enthralled.