A follow-up to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator was a priority from the minute the 2000 epic wrapped its massive box-office run and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Working at first with DreamWorks, then later at Paramount Pictures after Steven Spielberg’s company sold off its IP, Scott and a rotating team of screenwriters spent two decades searching for a way to bring Gladiator protagonist Maximus (Russell Crowe), killed off by the end of the movie, back to the screen.
Some of the ideas were standard-issue, like a younger-days prequel. Others weren’t, like a crazy-ass sequel that propelled Maximus into World War II. Nothing worked until the creative team entirely scrapped the idea of bringing Maximus back, and refocused the drama on Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal) — the son Maximus never knew he had.
What seems like a simple volley — casually repeating the events of Gladiator with a new gladiator front and center — ended up a bit more convoluted, perhaps because Scott’s sensibilities evolved over 20 years. Gladiator II, which finally hit theaters 24 years after the original, is more from the filmmaker who brought us House of Gucci and Alien: Covenant than the man behind Alien or Black Hawk Down.
That has its highs and lows; Gladiator II is actually a far better action movie than Gladiator, with leaner fights and wider-angled staging. (The 2000 movie, for all its Oscar glory, is a shaky-cam mess!) But as a showcase of throwback epic Hollywood acting, it’s all over the place. For all the genuine star power Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, and Connie Nielsen bring to the screen, Scott doesn’t bring them all together in a single coherent tale. There are extreme highs and lows.
So who comes out on top? Here’s my official ranking of the flavors you will experience watching Gladiator II.
6. Pedro Pascal and Connie Nielsen in… stuffy Oscar bait?
Burdened with most of the exposition and stretches of sustained glowering, Pascal and Nielsen are stuck in the political-drama variant of Gladiator II that no one involved really seems interested in making. Oh well. Scott gifts Pascal with a badass fight at the top of the movie before punishing his character, Marcus Acacius, by making him move the plot forward.
Marcus, an esteemed Roman general, is tortured in his role as an accomplice to the emperors’ never-ending, brutal quest for power. Nielsen, returning from the original Gladiator as Lucilla, is now Marcus’ lover and co-conspirator in a plot to take back Rome in a coup. The pair spend most of the movie whispering in dimly lit corners of the palace about how they urgently need to do something in the name of do-gooder ex-emperor Marcus Aurelius.
The result is extremely stiff, veering on melodramatic when Lucilla realizes the new gladiator in town is her long-lost son. But both have mastered the art of “make a face when a heinous act of violence is committed in the Colosseum” reactions, so there’s that.
5. A bunch of digital baboons in… a cut scene from Congo?
I don’t know why Ridley Scott thought his new gladiator needed to fight a horde of snarling, slobbering baboons in Gladiator II, but we do get that. Primate VFX have come a long way since the monkeys from Jumanji — see, just this year: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and Better Man — but this ain’t it. A complete overreach from Scott to up the ante of his battles, a teetering over into fantasy. But I do appreciate the choice more after hearing why Scott decided to put baboon-fighting in the movie. When asked by Deadline earlier this month:
I have to have [the gladiators] fighting something which is formidable. So I cast 12 very small stuntmen. Some of them are not children, but tough teens, quite tiny. And I put them all in black tights and for fun, I painted whiskers on them. And we went to war with stunt men. So it becomes a stunt men brawl of savagery. So then I had all the physicality recorded of the actors. I removed the guy in black tights put in wire frames of baboons where it looks good, the movement looks real. You then put on the flesh and the hair. That’s how you do it. That is a masterwork of digital work right there. You change nothing into a furry baboon.
DEADLINE: Does everyone appreciate what you’ve shot?
SCOTT: No. Some idiot says to me, I’ve never seen a baboon like that before. I said, well, the baboon has alopecia, where you lose all your fucking hair. I copied that from the baboon I saw in the car park, which had alopecia. I thought, who is that? And it was this everything sinew tendon with no fat, like muscular steel. I said, that’s my monster. I said, Paul, you know what would be cool? Turn the tables on the baboon. If you bite the baboon, the baboon will be psychologically in shock. Bite the baboon. When he snarls, you snarl back and the baboon goes, holy sh*t. That’s meant to be funny.
According to actor Fred Hechinger at the post-Q&A screening that I attended in October, the director really loves monkeys — a live-action one plays a pivotal role in the movie, too. So the nonhuman work in Gladiator II can’t sit at the bottom of this list… but it’s close.
4. Russell Crowe in… uh, Gladiator?
Crowe is not technically in Gladiator II. In fact, earlier this year, he lamented the fact that Maximus was super dead and super not being written into the sequel. He wasn’t even asked to appear as a Force ghost!
“I’m slightly uncomfortable with the fact they’re making another one — because, of course, I’m dead and I have no say in what gets done,” he said on the Kyle Meredith With… podcast in June. “I reflect back: the age I was when I made that film and all the things that came after it, the doors that particular movie opened for me. This is just me being purely honest: There’s definitely a tinge of melancholy, a tinge of jealousy. […] I remember when I had tendons.”
But Gladiator II lives in the shadow of Crowe’s performance, retconning a familial connection between Lucius and Maximus that was only implied in the original, and leaning heavily on flashbacks to the first movie. And he rocks! Gladiator: great movie!
3. Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger in… Geta and Caracalla Go to White Castle?
Again at a post-screening Q&A, Hechinger said that Ridley Scott wanted an unlikely pair to inform his two new co-emperors: Beavis and Butt-Head. This really clarifies what Quinn (soon to be seen playing probably a bit of a dipshit as Johnny Storm in 2025’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps) and Hechinger (already a known slacker/stoner type from his work on The White Lotus season 1 and Thelma) are doing in Gladiator II. Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa don’t devote enough screen time to Emperors Geta and Caracalla for the pair of actors to carve out characters as sinister as Joaquin Phoenix’s in the original, but they do pop as a pair of knuckleheads who are high on power and giggling like Tom Hulce in Amadeus. I laughed.
2. Paul Mescal in… the direct-to-video action sequel to Gladiator?
Mescal is doing Extreme Hollywood Leading Man work in his first big tentpole role. His character, Lucius, is the perfect guy — a devout partner, a fearless warrior, a best bud, and a sensitive son. The Irish actor is well suited for the mode; he’s an understated performer who can charm with just a trace smile. He’s still the same down-to-earth actor from All of Us Strangers and Aftersun, just with 15 extra pounds of ripped, muscular mass.
But Mescal’s Lucius is a different flavor than Crowe’s Maximus from the first movie — a little less rage, a little less reason. Under Scott’s direction, he is mostly there to look cool as shit. (And he often does.) Whereas Maximus’ deep political beliefs pumped through his veins as he tore through combatants on his quest to slay Phoenix’s Commodus, Lucius has more of a John Wickian composure when he’s kicking ass.
Which all works! But when Washington enters the room to butt heads, there are few sparks. And by the end, when Lucius gives his rousing but obligatory speeches to the men of Rome about rebuilding their great nation into a place that will stand up for the little guys… It’s all a little generic. But man, can he wield a sword without batting an eye.
1. Denzel Washington in… Roman House (Domus?) of Cards?
Washington descends into any project with gravitational force. Whatever the story, the cast, the vision — it all bends around him. He is a titan, full of swagger and guile, and at his best when he is the only name on the marquee: think Malcolm X, the Equalizer movies, or even Training Day, a two-hander all about the allure and danger of following a charismatic man’s lead.
He brings the exact same energy to Gladiator II, which unfortunately is an ensemble movie. But Washington remains magnetic. His character, Macrinus, is a mover and shaker, a recruiter whose gladiatorial teams win him the kind of fame and fortune that buys political influence. Macrinus has his sights on all of Rome, and is cutthroat enough to do whatever it takes to seize political power. He’s in his own little House of Cards.
It’s easy to see why Ridley Scott wanted Washington for the role; it’s not too far off from their last collab, the crime saga American Gangster. But Washington gets to chew up even more scenery as a character who operates with moral abandon. During my post-screening Q&A, Washington said that he really got into character when he slipped on the dozen or so gold rings that Macrinus wears throughout the movie. Combined with a flowing robe, it’s pure blinged-out flamboyance. No one else in the movie can really compete.
Spoilery bonus: Derek Jacobi in the Derek Jacobi Master Class Seminar
The veteran thespian known for his long list of Shakespearean credits returns from Gladiator, where he played a key member of the senate, for a few scenes in Gladiator II. I am removing him from the core ranking out of esteem and respect — this is a man who holds the distinction of having been knighted in two different countries! He also may have spent a day or two on set, max. Spoiler: He gets stabbed in the neck at one point in Gladiator II, and makes an amazing “Ack, I’ve been stabbed in the neck!” face. There should be an Oscar category for that. Jacobi should win.
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