If men, according to the internet, simply cannot stop thinking about the Roman empire, then Hollywood remains a largely male-brained enterprise. Storytelling trends come and go, but the Roman epic has been a recurring fixture of blockbuster cinema for more than a century. Twenty-five years ago, Ridley Scott’s beefy, lavishly appointed action film Gladiator marked a resurgence in the genre after some time off, winning a best picture Oscar and spawning a new wave of sweeping, grunting imitators.
Now, Gladiator II is among them. Scott’s surprisingly belated follow-up substitutes Paul Mescal’s brooding glower for Russell Crowe’s brawny roar, but otherwise follows the template of its predecessor in a way that renders it as much remake as sequel. Playing the son (thanks to some blatant narrative revisionism) of Crowe’s Roman general turned gladiator Maximus, Mescal’s Lucius follows the same trajectory through capture, imprisonment and revenge via some grisly theatrics in the Colosseum. The film is missing the hungry intensity of Crowe’s star presence, while its aesthetic is muddier than the blood-and-gold spectacle of the original, but it’s enjoyable just the same. Piling on the gore and the absurdity (sharks in a Roman arena? Why not?), Scott directs it like a sword-and-sandal B-movie with an A-movie budget.
