Gladiator II (2024 | USA/United Kingdom | 148 minutes | Ridley Scott)

Director Ridley Scott’s Gladiator became a stealth box-office smash back in the day, and therein lay part of its charm. No one expected a period drama—a consistently tough sell for the last 50 years—to take the box office by storm in 2000. Yet somehow Gladiator defied the odds, becoming a mammoth hit and nabbing five Oscars that year, including a Best Picture statue and a Best Actor win for leading man Russell Crowe. 

Unlike a lot of Best Picture Oscar winners, Gladiator’s held up pretty well in the ensuing 20-plus years since its initial release. It’s not quite the thinking person’s period action movie that Scott intended, but it represents some of the director’s best visceral storytelling—a rip-roaring adventure brimming with genuinely thrilling action scenes, anchored by Crowe’s coiled intensity, bolstered by an astonishing ensemble cast of some of Britain’s greatest thespians, and imbued with just a bit of (dare I say it?) heart. 

It’s as effective for what it doesn’t do, as for what it does. Much of its first third plays out with minimal dialogue, telling its story visually and allowing viewers to acclimate to the period atmosphere. Scott and screenwriter David Franzoni also keep the narrative’s political machinations concise without under-nourishing them. And with its lean, revenge-stoked storyline, the original Gladiator winds up feeling—in a good way—like a really exciting western, effectively exchanging spurs and six-shooters for armor and broadswords. 

Now, after a 24-year hiatus, Ridley Scott’s returned to the Ancient Roman Well for a follow-up. And at face value, Gladiator II delivers almost as much bang for the buck as its predecessor. Too bad about that script. 

Gladiator II picks up things 16 years after the events of the first Gladiator, as Roman expat Hanno (Paul Mescal) and his wife Arishat (Yuval Gonen) fight on behalf of their adopted homeland of Numidia against the massive onslaught of a Roman invasion. Numidia falls, Arishat perishes in the battle, and Hanno is captured and enslaved. It’s soon revealed (to the audience, if not most of the movie’s characters) that Hanno is actually Lucius Verus, illegitimate son of Crowe’s Maximus character and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, reprising her role from the original), beloved daughter of deceased emperor Marcus Aurelius. 

Bought and mentored by cagey gladiatorial impresario Macrinus (Denzel Washington), Lucius becomes a formidable gladiator, and his star begins to rise. Complicating (and motivating) matters is Lucilla’s marriage to Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), the general who oversaw the takeover of Numidia. A quest for revenge, political intrigue, and lots of fighting and killing ensue. 

There’s no disputing that Scott and his creative/tech team serve up the carnage, and the Wow Moments, in Gladiator II with gusto. Two-plus decades of visual effects advancement ensure that the invading Roman armada, the packed gladiatorial arenas, and the frequent episodes of slaughter run bigger, louder, bloodier, and more convincing than in the original. 

Much of the acting likewise reflects (and embraces) Gladiator II’s more-is-more aesthetic. Here, we get not one but two despotic emperors, twins Geta (Joseph Quinn, a loooong way from Stranger Things’ Eddie Munson) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger, an equally long way from his charming supporting turn in the SIFF film festival hit, Thelma). Best of all, Washington gnaws magnificently at the scenery as Macrinus, playing up his movie-star charm just enough to keep his every move and machination wonderfully unpredictable and thoroughly entertaining. 

Unfortunately, David Scarpa’s uneven screenplay feels like two different movies in a perpetual, unwinnable arena battle. The whiplash-inducing tonal chasms in the ensemble’s performances seem to reflect this. Quinn, Hechinger, and especially Washington seem to be having a whale of a time playing to the back row of the proverbial colosseum. Mescal, Nielsen, and Pascal, by contrast, deliver a surplus of earnestness; and seldom does the twain meet. The callbacks to the original feel stilted and heavy-handed, there’s no need for so many damned protagonists, and the climax completely, categorically loses its shit like a tourist with giardia. Scott’s not totally in the clear, either. He buffaloes through the overabundance of convoluted melodrama with the impatience of an ADD-addled kid mashing the fast-forward button until he hits the good stuff.

Then again, Scott’s also enough of a showman to readily indulge his audience’s collective lizard brain, so things never get dull. The highlights reel of mayhem includes (but is definitely NOT restricted to) epic land-sea battles; head-lopping; impalement by human and animal implements; multiple graphic attacks by a couple of animal species; throat slitting; syphilitic demagoguery; and limb-hacking. If the original Gladiator was a John Ford western wearing an ornate toga, Gladiator II is, at its core, an extra-glossy $300 million exploitation movie. And answering the original’s rhetorical question, “Are you not entertained??” depends largely on how much you enjoy this sequel’s gleeful sensationalism…and how much you’re willing to ignore the lack of a soul at its center.

Gladiator II opens in theaters everywhere Friday, November 22. Image courtesy Paramount Pictures.