You know going into a sword-and-sandals movie like this you’re going to get three things: blood, stunts, and CGI. “Gladiator II” has lots of all of that, plus a plot that doesn’t really matter, because all you have to do is wait about five minutes through the dialogue-heavy portions to get to another fight scene.
As he has proven over and over (including last year in “Napoleon,” which I reviewed here), director Ridley Scott knows how to fill the screen with spectacle — giant crowd scenes, naval battles, and large structures like the Colosseum in Rome. That where the hero, Lucius (Paul Mescal), and his fellow gladiators are forced to fight each other or a warrior atop a rhinoceros (!) or any number of CGI animals, including sharks (!!) and rabid mutant monkey dogs (!?!).
No, I did not just string four random words together. It’s the only way I can describe whatever the hell those things were.
Subtlety is not Scott’s specialty. That’s why there’s so much overacting in “Gladiator II,” especially from Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger, who the play twin Roman emperors. As for the rest of the primary cast, Mescal declares “I am not an orator” — not once, but twice — before launching into extended inspirational speeches. Pedro Pascal has a perpetual scowl as a Roman general and Connie Nielsen, as his wife, acts as if she has just walked in from the set of “Wonder Woman 3” without changing outfits.
Even Denzel chews the scenery several times. But anytime he is on screen, my eyes go immediately to him, because he’s always the most talented person in any movie he appears in. With the exception of the scores of stunt people, who certainly earned their keep in this film.
There isn’t a single plot point in “Gladiator II” that comes as a surprise.
Wait, I take that back, there was one. In any story like this, there’s always a character who says, “I put my sword down long ago and swore to never pick it up again.” That’s usually foreshadowing of a later scene in which he does pick up a sword, joins the battle, and is killed (cue the sad music). But to my absolute amazement, the person who speaks those words in “Gladiator II” is still alive when the credits roll.
No one else offered anything memorable — including the thousands of computer-generated humans who make up the crowd in the Colosseum or take part in the battle sequences. At times, they made me think the movie shouldn’t be called “Gladiator II.” Its title should be “Gladiator AI.”
Scott even includes a scene ripped off from Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus,” in which several of enslaved gladiators step forward to claim they are the troublemaker the jailers are looking for. I’m sure Scott would prefer to call it “an homage,” but he doesn’t have to worry because very few 21st-century moviegoers are even aware of that 1960 Kirk Douglas classic.
In his career, Scott has made several excellent smaller-scale pictures (e.g. “The Martian,” “Thelma and Louise,” “All The Money In The World,” “Matchstick Men”). I wish he’d direct more of them. Sadly, modern Hollywood rarely makes those movies anymore, which is why we keep getting super-sized cacophonies like this, with a budget of over $300 million.
Since “Gladiator II” and “Wicked” both open today in theaters, some on social media are trying to turn them into a double-feature moviegoing phenomenon a la “Barbie” + “Oppenheimer” = “Barbenheimer.” But “Glicked” doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as well. Rather, it sounds like someone were forced to sit through every skit Martin Short did as his Jiminy Glick character.
I give “Gladiator II” a 5 out of 10. However, if you’re determined to pay good money to sit through it, I do recommend seeing it on the largest screen possible so as to take in the full scope of Scott’s bombast.
If you’re lucky, it might be playing near you in the I-Maximus format.