Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Gladiator II’ on VOD, a Swords-and-Sandals Clash Goosed by Denzel Washington

By John Serba

Denzel, Denzel, DenZEL! Without this beloved treasure of an actor, Gladiator II (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) almost certainly would be a shrugworthy endeavor, another generally passable late-career effort from director Ridley Scott. The film arrived nearly a quarter-century after Gladiator became the rare box office smash that also won a best picture Oscar, and remarkably for a film earning that honor, remains a beloved classic by professional and amateur movie knowers alike. Of course, Russell Crowe is out this time, because his character died and nobody had the guts to make the batshit sequel Nick Cave wrote (it had to do with Maximus being granted a second life by the gods, who send him back to Earth to murder Christians. Hell yeah!), so in his stead is Aftersun Oscar nominee Paul Mescal, who joins returnee Connie Nielsen and Pedro Pascal for a movie that will never escape the shadow of its predecessor, surely because it begs comparison to it far too often. Might still be worth a watch, though. 

GLADIATOR II: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: THE FALL OF ROME IS IMMINENT. Uh oh. It seems the current mad-emperor sibling duo of Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) ain’t going over very well. Sixteen years have passed since our man Maximus died in the gladiator arena, thus rendering his concerted efforts to make Rome a free and just empire were apparently for naught. Sucks to be him, I guess. The current leadership is thirsty for conquest, sending General Acacius (Pascal) to expand Rome’s boundaries via invasion and mass murder. His legions dock in the African country of Numidia and lay waste to the defending army and Acacius looks wearily upon the weeping masses mourning their dead loved ones. “I claim this city for the glory of Rome,” he sighs, obviously Sick Of This Shit. He’s not a dummy, but being under the thumb of powerful idiots has put him here, aware that their power is tenuous, because you can’t keep slaughtering and slaughtering and slaughtering peoples without unwittingly inspiring someone to rise up and return the favor. 

Case in point, Hanno (Mescal). He’s a strong and smart leader of men and adopted citizen of Numidia who sees his beloved warrior wife slain and is enslaved by the Roman army. He now wants nothing more than to see Acacius’ noggin rolling in the dirt, detached from the rest of his body. He also wants to see Rome restored to its democratic state via a change in leadership, but that comes later. First, he’s shoved into the gladiator arena to fight daggertoothed CGI baboons, and his monkey-biting savagery not only not not entertains the citizenry, but also catches the eye of Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a gladiator wrangler who has enough clout, he’s a patron of Senator Thraex’s (Tim McInnerny) wild bacchanals and occasionally in the same room with the hard-partying emperors. “Rage pours out of you like milk from a whore’s tit,” Macrinus says of Hanno, and Macrinus doesn’t even know the half of it. 

And the more-than-half-of-it gets thick indeed, prompting me to tread carefully with ye olde plot details here. Hanno ends up back in the arena fighting a behemoth riding a rhino, and our guy looks up and spots a face familiar to us and to him: Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), wife of Acacius and the lone cast holdover from the first Gladiator. Hm. Interesting development. Wonder if it might spur a plot running parallel to that movie. I mean, it won Oscars. Who wouldn’t want to see basically the same thing over again, except with gladiator battles that up the ante to include flooded arenas full of hungry sharks? Anyway, Acacius and Lucilla secretly plot a coup to overthrow Geta and Caracalla, while Macrinus eyes his own path to snatch power, a reflection of the instability of Rome, whose current rulers are too stupid to realize that they keep staging big spectacles allowing Hanno to rally the support of the citizenry. It’s pretty obvious the emperors believe that Rome is too big to fail. Dummies.

Photo: ©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Gladiator. It reminds me of Gladiator. A bit too much.

Performance Worth Watching: Denzel is in his eff-it-I’m-gonna-have-FUN phase, relishing the opportunity to gnaw on some scenery and slice through the film’s weighty earnestness.

Memorable Dialogue: There’s something diabolically amusing about Denzel Washington reciting the line, “I know this one. He eats monkeys.”

Sex and Skin: None outside the occasional almost-revealing flowy toga. 

Our Take: Gladiator II is fairly typical of late-period Scott – brilliant in places, slapdash in others, and generally too perfunctory to feel like the work of a fully committed artist. Granted, his baseline is higher than other directors’, and the film is better than his two previous and similarly overlong epics, the campfest House of Gucci and brutally unfocused Napoleon. This sequel isn’t the work of an emperor with no clothes, but one is left with the lingering sense that he’s staging spectacles without fully considering the narrative machinery powering them, or that audiences undoubtedly prefer the visceral joys of human-on-human fight choreography (those John Wicks are hits for a reason) over silly CG kiddie shit with baboons and sharks.

But Scott was wise enough to find a way to fit an all-timer like Denzel into this project, as if knowing the script needed a smack in the ass. We’d rather watch the actor flutter his fingers and deliver monologues and one-liners with juicy affectation than see Mescal – charismatic, but a touch bland – clash and wrestle with VFX in front of a green screen. Scott puts enough muscle behind the action sequences to mostly cancel out our eyerolls, and notably, Hanno’s mano-a-manos with a thug and, inevitably, Macrinus himself, are far more effective renderings of violent conflict, because they feel alive and tangible.

Gladiator II’s other components tend to clatter around within a narrative that’s a bit sloppy, but at least vaguely satisfying. Nielsen feels like plot glue holding everything together; Pals of Pascal will be disappointed by his thin character and minimal screen time; McInnerny’s portrayal of a flamboyant and slimy senator is as much of a cartoon as the baboons. More effective is Hechinger, skeeving things up as a syphilitic worm of a ruler who parks in the senate and grants great power of position to his beloved pet monkey; you’ll enjoy every second of hating the living shit out of him. 

Ultimately, the film ends up aping much of the plot and character developments of Gladiator, awkwardly shoehorning itself into its narrative with some hot retconning action. It seems unnecessary, and leaves us with the lingering sense that a spinoff plot in the spirit of the original would’ve been more effective. But thanks to Denzel and a bit of directorial oomph, Gladiator II squeaks by in its attempt to justify its existence. It’s at the very least transporting and highly watchable despite its flaws, the mark of a director who’s spent the last decade content to churn out movies that you don’t regret seeing, but probably won’t be compelled to see again.

Our Call: THE GODS HAVE SPOKEN! And they say, “Eh, STREAM IT, I guess.” Who says the gods can’t be ambivalent?

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.