‘Gladiator II’ Is a Paul Mescal Thirst Trap With Swords
And so we go once more into the Colosseum, a place where bread and circuses reign supreme. A mad emperor, his mind slowly rotting, puts a once-mighty empire on the brink of total and utter collapse. The ruling class has gone from corruptible to corrupt. The masses are kept distracted by extravagant spectacles, their bloodlust constantly fed even when their bellies are empty. Power-hungry hustlers kiss up to the nation’s leader, in the hopes of gaining favor and status. Should he point his thumb down, however, they may find themselves facing the lions for the amusement of others. Once upon a time, a doddering old man spoke of a dream about a united city in this empire’s capital, where every man, woman, and child could walk its streets and live a good life regardless of their patrician or plebeian birthright. But “that is not a dream, it is a fiction,” we’re told, and not even the bravest warrior can fully turn back the ever-rising tides of internal rot.
But enough about the 2024 presidential election. Gladiator II, the long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning epic of swords and sandals, picks up 16 years after the deaths of both Marcus Aurelius (played by Richard Harris in the original) and Russell Crowe’s heavyweight Colosseum champ Maximus, both of whom perished because they believed that Rome could remake itself into a utopia. History would prove otherwise — spoiler alert: It’s doomed — and given that the sequel finds the fabled city even closer to its fall, a last-minute reprieve is clearly not in the cards. There is talk of insurrections and coups and class divides and revolutions and uprisings, and in terms of an allegory, it’s malleable enough that both sides of our current sociopolitical divide might feel they’re being represented here. But Sir Ridley Scott does not want to deliver a connect-the-dots lecture. “Are you not entertained?!” Maximus bellowed at the crowd, his voice dripping with irony. The director turns the first film’s most famous line into something like a mission statement: Let me entertain you.
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Sir Ridley is 87 years old, and we only mention this because there’s a vibrancy and verve to so much of this sequel that you’d swear the unbelievably prolific filmmaker has a personal fountain of youth in his Malibu mansion’s backyard. We’re convinced that he continues to make movies well into his wintry years merely as a fuck-you to his critics — spite has been his diesel fuel since his 1978 debut, The Duellists, was dismissed as style over substance — and decades of success have not made him more calmer or more complacent. Still, the notion that Scott would actually get around to following up one of his most beloved works is a bit of a miracle. Scripts for a potential sequel, some of them infamous, have come and gone over the past 20 years, and a massive biblical epic is not a project most octogenarian folks would take on. If you asked Sir Ridley how often he’s thought about the Roman empire since the turn of this century, however, he’d say a lot. And the proof of that is definitely on the screen.
Thus, we are dropped into Numidia, a colony in Northern Africa circa 196 A.D., where a young man named Lucius (Paul Mescal) is about to unleash hell on the Roman navy. He’s a farmer by trade but a warrior out of necessity, and he’s rousing his fellow Numidians to defend their land from the approaching ships filled with centurions. “Where we are, death is not,” he says, which turns out to be a little too optimistic. After suffering a personal loss and becoming a prisoner of war, Lucius is brought before a “master of gladiators,” where he and several other burly men must prove their mettle in the death pit.
As with the original, Gladiator II kicks off with both an epic battle sequence designed to dazzle viewers and an extended introduction to the soulful, masculine hero we’ll spend the next two-plus hours following to Hades and back. An Irish actor who’s wowed audiences with delicate, intimate performances in Normal People, Aftersun, and All of Us Strangers, and who’s already inspired numerous Reddit threads devoted to his thighs, Mescal is given a chance to step up as an old-school, matinee-idol leading man here. And like his Australian predecessor, running around in a tunic and attacking everything from ginormous human opponents to a killer menagerie (baboons, rhinos, and sharks, oh my!) suits him. The film is meant to be the sort of biblical throwback that was a steady part of folks’ moviegoing diet in the 1950s and 1960s, albeit updated with a lot more gore, decapitations, and disembowelments. But it’s also very much a modern-day thirst trap, the kind that brings to mind this question, and this sequel more or less coronates Mescal as a movie star who could be the second coming of Charlton Heston as much as Montgomery Clift.
Mescal is the center of attention here, the oppressed hero who will do anything in the name of revenge; if he can work his way up through the gladiatorial ranks in order to issue payback to Marcus Acasius (Pedro Pascal), the Roman general who slew Lucius’ loved one, so be it. But the young actor isn’t the star that lights up Gladiator II like a legion of klieg lights — that would be Denzel Washington. From the moment the veteran Oscar winner struts onto the screen in an ornate robe, Denzel owns the film. A former slave who’s worked his way up to managing gladiators, many of whom participate in the “games” designed to amuse the twin emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), his character Macrinus immediately takes a shine to his new potential recruit. When Mescal bites an angry monkey’s arm during an “audition,” Macrinus looks like he’s seconds away from licking his own lips with joy. He immediately recognizes a deep reservoir of rage in the young man, and that’s something he can use in the name of his own rise to prominence. “I have a destiny,” Macrinus says. “The gods have delivered you to me. You will be my instrument.”
That’s just one of the exchanges that Washington makes a four-course meal out of, along with a death-blow remark to a debt-ridden senator (“I own your house — I want your loyalty”) and a casual confession to Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla (“Rome must fall … I need only give it a push”). Lucilla is one of the few characters to make the leap from the 2000 movie to Gladiator II, and she provides the primary connective tissue between both films; when she recognizes the way that Lucius sifts sand through his fingers during a fight to the death, Lucilla is the person who confirms the pedigree of this mystery man from the outer colonies. Even before this mic-drop revelation, however, you’ll find yourself torn between two dueling storylines: a brave gladiator’s quest for vengeance that turns into a desire for liberation on a grand scale, giving Rome one last chance to be that shining city on a hill; and a charismatic schemer who knows exactly how to play a brother who’s mad with power against another who’s simply mad. Only one of them gets to issue threats while camping it up with a severed head, so don’t be surprised if you find your allegiance shifting more toward the villain.
Washington is having so much fun playing this blatant opportunist, and Mescal makes for such a compelling opponent, that you might forgive the movie for running out of steam before the final act. Scott has outdone himself trying to up the ante in terms of displaying outrageous, thumbs-up spectacles — a naval battle complete with prowling great white predators, that aforementioned men-vs.-baboons bout — and tacked on so many endings that there’s a slight sense of exhaustion by the time we get to the final-boss battle. Still, this sequel mostly makes good on the promise of building from a foundation that goes back centuries yet carbon-dates to just a quarter of a century ago, the one issued from a man, bloodied but unbowed, standing before a spectators who want their money’s worth. You will not be necessarily be enlightened, empowered, or enthralled by all of Gladiator II. But you will almost assuredly be entertained.
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