Gladiator II review: 'eye-popping and outrageous'

Paul Mescal in Gladiator II | Contributed

Gladiator II (15) ★★★★☆

Silent Men (12A) ★★★★☆

Ridley Scott returns to Ancient Rome once more with Gladiator II, a belated sequel to his earlier, mega-successful Oscar-winner. That film, released in 2000, revived a long-dormant genre, ushered in a new era of visual effects filmmaking and made Russell Crowe — who played Roman general-turned-gladiator Maximus Decimus Meridius — a bona-fide movie star. It also recalibrated Scott’s career, turning him from a purveyor of hit-and-miss studio fare whose best work — Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise — was behind him, into the Ridley Scott of today: a relentlessly energetic and prolific blockbuster auteur, able to turn around a slickly entertaining cinematic epic every 12-to-18 months at an age when most veteran filmmakers are slowing down and most younger filmmakers are too picky or too obsessed with their own legacy to get anything done (Scott turns 87 at the end of November; Gladiator II is his 19th feature this century).

The good news about the new film is that it’s every bit as eye-popping and outrageous as a Gladiator sequel should be. Indeed, it’s so stuffed with wildly grandiose set-pieces that the repeated sight of its star, Paul Mescal, trying to outdo the tiger-wrestling scene from the original almost qualifies as a running joke. Want to see him bite a chunk out of a bloodthirsty baboon, face down a hard-charging rhino, or battle a slew of Roman soldiers in the shark-infested waters of a flooded Colosseum? Well, Gladiator II has you covered. 

Mescal takes the lead as Maximus’s illegitimate son, Lucius, a 12-year-old lad in the first film who knew nothing of his real father, but whose origins were — rather fortuitously for this film — hinted at in the implicit romantic history between Maximus and Lucius’s mother, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, who once again reprises her role). Exiled as a boy for his own safety, the Lucius of this film is now living with his warrior wife (Yuval Gonenon) in the coastal city of Numidia, where the Roman army, led by Pedro Pascal’s reluctant general Marcus Acacius, will soon arrive to conquer it for the glory of Rome’s corrupt sibling emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger). 

Crushing the resulting resistance — and slaying Lucius’s wife in the process — Acacius returns to Rome to be honoured with a series of games in the Colosseum, leaving the vengeance-seeking Lucius to be enslaved by Denzel Washington’s Macrinus, a savvy political operator who sees in Lucius a way to inveigle his way into the inner circle of Rome’s ruling elite by exploiting Lucius’s gladiatorial prowess and promising him Acacius’ head. 

Denzel Washington in Gladiator II | Contributed

That Acacius is now married to Lucilla and helping her plan the downfall of Rome’s despotic duo adds familial tension and political intrigue to a plot that otherwise follows a similar trajectory to the first film - something that can’t help but invite comparisons between Mescal and Crowe, and not always favourable ones.

The burly, rugged machismo of Crowe’s performance penetrated pop culture so completely — from early internet memes to masturbatory fantasies in Sex in the City — it’ll likely echo for whatever now counts as eternity in our social media hellscape. Mescal, by contrast, is a fine actor and has certainly done the physical work to bulk up, but even with his stentorian growl and facial resemblance to a young Richard Harris (who played Lucius’s grandfather, Marcus Aurelius, in the first film), the Aftersun star doesn’t quite have Crowe’s commanding presence or facility with portentous dialogue. 

Still, he’s very watchable, particularly in the aforementioned fight sequences, and he gets one great scene where he flummoxes the effete tyrants ruining Rome by following his slaughter of their best fighter with a verse of Virgil. Scott ups the ante, too, by giving Washington his juiciest blockbuster role in aeons. Adorning Macrinus with Shakespearean levels of inscrutability and cunning as he bends Rome to his will, Washington keeps the film on its toes as it works through a story that puts a little too much naive faith in the willingness of the downtrodden to turn against demagoguery when corruption is laid bare before them. And yet even that newly redundant bit of Hollywood wish fulfilment might be a sly gag on Scott’s part. He knows what really thrills the mob is the chance to indulge their primal instincts, just as he knows the same is true of movie audiences. The cinema is his Colosseum. He taps into the lizard brain in all of us. 

Silent Men | Contributed

Scottish documentary maker Duncan Cowles’ new film Silent Men takes an amusingly droll approach to tackling the stigma of men opening up about their feelings.

Simultaneously deconstructing the filmmaking process as a way of slyly confronting his own taciturn nature, he interviews close family members, friends and strangers over the course of several years to try and unpick the reasons why men struggle to tell people how they feel and what the consequences — both casual and catastrophic — can be of keeping things bottled up. 

Gladiator II is in cinemas from 15 November; Silent Men is on selected release in cinemas from 19 November