Gladiator 2

I liked everything about it except the script. 

Hollywood still has a few old lions roaming around ready to slay dragons and entertain the masses.

Denzel Washington is still money. All day.

Director Ridley Scott lucked out with Russel Crowe (and Joaquin Phoenix) a quarter century ago. Here he lucks out again getting the movie star equivalent of prime Mike Tyson to come in and knock out fools. 

“Your house, I own it,” Denzel’s Macrinus says at one point. He might as well have been saying, “Your movie, I own it.” 

The rest of this is such a mess that I quite literally felt relief everytime Denzel showed up. 

“Thank goodness, it’s another Denzel scene,” I whispered to myself at one point. 

That … is not the sign of a healthy movie. 

Of course, I know that most people aren’t wired like me and don’t come to something called Gladiator 2 for the intricacies of the plot. No one’s looking for Ben Hur or I, Claudius here. Or Spartacus. Or even Quo Vadis. 

And yes, those are all the Roman epics I can remember off the top of my head. 

They actually do the ‘I Am Spartacus’ moment at one point. It’s played for laughs but it was funny and I wasn’t offended. But I hope someone sent Dalton Trumbo’s family $50. 

Paul Mescal does what he can with a movie that isn’t all that interested in him except as a violence delivery device. 

The flashbacks fail him, the characters around him are all cardboard cutouts instead of real boys and he doesn’t get one line of dialogue as cool as, “Are you not entertained!” 

He seems like he’s having fun and we mostly go with it even when it’s ridiculous. Maybe especially when it’s ridiculous. 

Poor Connie Nielsen gets it worse as she campaigns for a return to a Rome governed by the senate and has to deal with a nonsensical subplot involving Mescal. 

Again, the writing fails the audience because at no point does anyone ever articulate why the old Rome is any better than the new. The movie clearly sides with Macrinus who believes that the old Rome is a lie and the only thing that ever meant anything was power. 

At one point he hisses about killing someone and says, “Politicssss.”

I can’t remember the full line and I can’t find it anywhere but I’m never gonna forget how Denzel added about 4 S’s to the end of ‘politics.’

Again, Denzel is Babe Ruth and the rest of the cast are just ballplayers. 

Pedro Pescal was given enough to do that you care about his fate. And because you cared about him when he and Mescal face off in the arena you actually care about the outcome. 

It’s the best arena scene and the other three had baboons, a rampaging rhino and frickin’ sharks! 

Funny what happens when you care about the characters. 

Ok here’s the rant you can ignore. 

I’ll tell you, sincerely, that I believe a lot of directors can do a lot of magical things and I enjoy a lot of what Ridley Scott, Denis Villeneuve and Michael Mann bring to the table. But I also am so incredibly tired of watching movies where every shot, special effect and camera movement was meticulously planned and no one gave two moments to think about the dialogue, motivations or whether anyone would give a shit about the characters. 

I’ll give you a perfect example. In any classic movie you have ever seen someone takes the time to introduce the other gladiators. Not a lot of time, just a bit of dialogue, a backstory or two. And there is some scene that explains why the gladiators would follow our hero to the death. Usually, he saves them and they connect and then they’ll die for him. 

Right? 

Ain’t none of that here. 

If you have seen this can you tell me with any certainty what Macrinus actual plan was? Did he want to be emperor? Did he just want to destroy Rome? Was he (spoiler) after vengeance against Poor Connie Nielsen because he was once a slave to her father? 

All of these things could be true and yet none of them could be true at the same time. 

In other words, this thing was a mess. A fun mess, to be sure. 

At the end Mescal is called on to deliver a speech in front of a horde of soldiers. That speech is supposed to signify … something about a new and better world. 

Damned if I can remember a word of it. And you can’t either. And that’s Gladiator 2 baby. 

As old Shakespeare once said, and Faulkner emphasized, it’s all sound and fury and not one gold denarii more.