Crazed homicidal baboons.
Many filmmakers might save the crazed homicidal baboons for the climactic stretch of their blood-soaked sword-and-sandal epic. That Ridley Scott serves up the crazed homicidal baboons near the start of Gladiator II, almost like an appetizer course, suggests how much bloody mayhem he still has in store for us. Over the two hours and change that follow, we get copious combat with huge sweaty dudes, one of them mounted on a rhinoceros, sea battles simulated in a flooded Colosseum, gladiatorial revolts, dismemberment and decapitation and other gory diversions.
And that’s just in the arena. Elsewhere around town we get skulking servants and mealy-mouthed senators, decadent banquets and conspiracies, and betrayals, all that good Roman skullduggery. The twists of the plot may recall Francis Ford Coppola’s recent modern-dress spin on Sallust in Megalopolis, dumbed down, but also less labored and more fun.
As in Scott’s 2000 hit Gladiator, to which this is a sequel, the hero in Gladiator II is a provincial everyman who is enslaved by the Imperial Roman oppressors after suffering outrageous, Spaghetti-western-worthy losses at their hands. The movie opens with a pretty spectacular naval assault on Numidia led by General Acacius (Pedro Pascal). Displaced Roman Lucius (Paul Mescal) is captured defending his adopted town and hauled off to the Empire, where he is sold to Macrinus (Denzel Washington) as a gladiator.
Harnessing his understandable rage, Lucius takes to the new gig. Soon he’s in the Eternal City, wowing the court of the effete joint Emperors, brothers Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger). As in the original, historical figures are freely mixed into the narrative, though they’re used fictitiously.
It’s useless to complain that the movie, scripted by David Scarpa, is full of historical hilarities like Roman newspapers more than a thousand years before the printing press, or killer sharks swimming around in what is presumably fresh water in the Colosseum. After all, Shakespeare put a clock chiming three in Julius Caesar, set more than a thousand years before clock towers were invented. Ridley Scott is certainly no Shakespeare, but he and Shakespeare care about anachronism to a roughly equal degree.
Though I’m inclined to like costume hokum of this sort, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the original Gladiator. That film’s rendering of Rome had a CGI sterility that made it feel ersatz to me. GII somehow has less of this effect, and I liked it better. As in Scott’s Napoleon from last year, the CGI in GII distances the violence, makes it less viscerally horrifying and easier to watch. But the environments are more convincing here, and the actors warm the movie up.
This is particularly true of Mescal, who manages to be convincing as a warrior while maintaining an unassuming, un-macho likability. The same goes for Pascal as the conflicted conqueror Acacius. Connie Nielsen suffers exquisitely as Lucilla, her character from the original. Best of all, as usual, is Denzel Washington. You can see he’s having a ball as the crafty, conniving, chuckling villain Macrinus. But he isn’t hammy or over-the-top; it’s a sly, subtle, carefully wrought performance. Plain and simple, the man knows how to act.
