What’s Latin for “Groundhog Day”? Once upon a time, Russell Crowe’s beefy hero Maximus in Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sandal classic Gladiator was the honest soldier outside the snickering metropolitan elite, out to gain vengeance and redeem Roman honour in the blood-spattered arena, his raw courage exposing the politicians’ contemptible decadence. His defiant cry “Are you not entertained?” spoke to the showbiz-political complex of our own time and when it was alleged last year that most men thought about ancient Rome every day, the suspicion was that what they were actually thinking about was … that film.
Now we are a generation along, and little has changed, in fact almost nothing. This sequel is watchable and spectacular, with the Colosseum created not digitally but as a gobsmacking 1-to-1 scale physical reconstruction with real crowds. Yet this film is weirdly almost a next-gen remake, effectively reincarnating almost every single narrative component of the original in a variant form, the events of the first film echoing in franchise eternity.
