With Gladiator being one of my favorite movies of all time, I was hesitant to even go see Gladiator 2, as I didn’t really want the original tainted by an underwhelming sequel.
Instead I was…whelmed, I suppose. I think Gladiator 2 does have some good aspects, those aspects being named Denzel Washington, but so much about the set-up and structure of this film is bizarre that I wanted to discuss it with other people that have seen it. Spoilers follow, obviously.
- The main issue I have is that at least the entire first half of the movie is establishing not just a very Maximus-like path for Hanno, it is a very weird dance about his identity, where we, the audience appear to obviously know that Hanno is Lucius, but it’s unclear if he knows. Then, if you’ve seen the first film, it’s very obvious that Lucius is actually Maximus’ son, which the movie treats as some sort of big reveal (at one point during my pre-film coverage, the studio emailed me to remind me that Lucius’ father’s identity was officially a “mystery”). In the end we learn that Lucius did know he was Lucius, but didn’t know he was Maximus’ son, and the whole thing is sort of a mess of figuring out what the audience is supposed to know, what the audience is supposed to be surprised by, and the same questions existing for the characters in the film.
- There is also essentially zero time devoted in this two and a half hour movie about what happened to Lucius these last 16 years. Was the plan actually for Lucilla to send him away and…never see him again? The movie made it seem like we’d see some sort of like, shipwreck or disaster that diverts him from whatever the plan was, but instead we just hear that he was found wandering around and adopted into his African community with no further elaboration. Then he’s mad at his mom for…sending him away to save his life? It is a good question as to why she never went to find him, but the film has no real answers about this, or what the plan was supposed to be originally here, and what may have gone wrong along the way.
- This wasn’t necessarily a plot point that was bad, but one of the most shocking scenes in the film is oddly shot in that Denzel’s Macrinus kills Emperor Geta from behind Emperor Caracalla, but the way it’s filmed, it looks like he’s murdering both of them, which makes it a bit confusing when Caracalla shows up in the next scene. I can’t tell whether that was supposed to be muddled on purpose, or if it was just poorly filmed.
- So much of this film was spoiled by the base concept and the trailer. Other than the whole “we obviously know who Paul Mescal is from the start” issue, the fact that Pedro Pascal’s Marcus Acacius is described in the synopsis as a “disgraced general” and we see him fighting the arena against Lucius takes all the air out of the film’s plot about overthrowing the Emperors. We know it will fail from the moment we hear the plan hatched. Similarly, I have never seen a character who was more obviously going to die than Lucius’ wife Arishat from quite literally fifteen seconds after she’s introduced. Huge chunks of the story here are just so loudly broadcast that there are few surprises.
- One surprise, and the best stretch of the film, is when Macrinus’ plot to seize power is revealed, which admittedly I did not see coming. At least not to the extent that he takes control of effectively the entire empire. But this too had a pretty big flaw at the end. If Macrinus had simply…not rode out in front of the army and done this unneeded 1v1 fight versus Lucius, he could have just stayed back and had his army crush the other one, as it seems less likely Lucius’ high school football speech would work in that context (also the enemy army is just taking his word that he’s the prince of Rome in that moment?). It also was not in keeping with Macrinus’ character to fling himself into danger and get into a physical fight with a gladiator champion when his entire thing was being a puppet master in the shadows.
Most of this did not work for me. Denzel salvaged a good part of the movie but suspension of disbelief only goes so far when it comes to these storylines, and this storyline just did not make much sense or was presented confusingly, at best. It’s not the original, not even close.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
