As of the end of November 2024, Ridley Scott will be 87 years old.  In this, the twilight of a major artist’s career, one might assume that the release of Gladiator II corresponds to a certain reckoning with the success of the first movie, 2000’s Gladiator—a box office smash, awards maven, and pre-9/11 codex for millennial bros with new DVD players to bring to college dorm rooms.

In the shadow of Francis Ford Coppola’s recent Megalopolis—undeniably the passion project of an aging Hollywood stalwart—Gladiator II could have been Scott’s reflection on the kind of creator he’s become in the two and a half decades since Gladiator. 

But nope. That’s not what Gladiator II is, and that’s not how Rid works. If anything, Scott’s latest film resembles last year’s Napoleon, both in its yawning dismissal of historical accuracy, and in that it’s a reasonably thrilling and workmanlike saga, uninterested in much beyond securing enough box office goodwill for Scott’s next workmanlike saga. He’s made 18 movies in the past 24 years; legacy and prolificacy will always wrestle within him. He is a knighted Englishman, an established name with no real financial or creative barriers in his way, just the whisper of death at his back getting louder and louder. 

Coincidentally, volume is the major difference between the first Gladiator and the second. Gladiator II is absolutely strident in IMAX, from its opening sea battle scenes—in which a hirsute little hunk of man called Hanno (Paul Mescal) kisses his warrior wife (Yuval Gonen, not much more of a token dead wife than in the original Gladiator), and then leads a small army of villagers in defending their coastal home from invading Roman legions—to its final heroic fight, which is just one of many heroic fights in a series of heroic fights apportioned drily over 150 minutes.

Stretched across god-awfully gigantic screens, Gladiator II is handsome, hugely-earnest spectacle, a magnanimous appeal to as many audiences as possible. The sound of thunderous catapult fodder and frequent, sonorously-brutal murder are set against a fabulistic pastiche of Roman history and some hardy melodrama.

Gladiator II has meaningless politics; swords go clang and big arrows go thunk and flesh is shredded wetly, all in 4K. 

If any of this sounds familiar, you may also know how much Gladiator defined masculinity for a dominant but burgeoning subset of guy culture in the early 2000s. Rather than recognize any of that, or even attempt to reimagine the warrior archetype—filled out by Russell Crowe in this film's predecessor like an especially tight leather tunic—Gladiator II mostly just rehashes the plot of Gladiator but doubles its size and scope. 

Previously on Gladiator, celebrated Roman general Maximus Decimus Meridius (Crowe) was sold into slavery after he’s betrayed by evil Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) and becomes a gladiator in the Colosseum and yaddah yaddah yaddah. He saves the Roman republic from Commodus’s dictatorial grasp by defeating him in hand-to-hand combat. Unfortunately, Maximus sustains mortal injuries too, and we watch him go to Elysium (i.e., Roman farmer heaven), where he’s reunited with his also-murdered wife and son. With his dying breath, Maximus assures Commodus’s sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) that her young son Lucius (Spencer Treat Clark) will finally be safe from her brother’s tyranny. We assume when he says Lucius will be safe, he means Rome too.

But nope. He actually just meant Lucius, because Gladiator II picks up about 16 years later, and flashbacks show us that Lucilla secretly sent Lucius away to hide amongst the Roman-occupied “barbarians,” fearing for his safety in the fallout of Commodus’s death.

As the film opens, Rome is on the brink of falling, barely ruled by twin emperors (suitably petulant Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger) and not, as Maximus had hoped, by the Senate. Folks, the dream of Rome appears to have died with the general.

Enter Hanno, who, after suffering defeat in the aforementioned sea battle against the forces of General Acacius (Pedro Pascal), follows much of the same character arc as Maximus. Sold into slavery under flamboyant Macrinus (Denzel Washington), an arms dealer with ambitious aims, Hanno is actually the estranged Lucius, the lost Prince of Rome, who must ascend from gladiator to revolutionary leader through increasingly dangerous action set pieces. 

Now backed by the appropriate technology, Scott can fill the Colosseum with digital water and perch a man with a pointy helmet on top of the CGI rhino he couldn’t afford the first time around. Maybe I’m only remembering the apocrypha of ancient DVD special features included with the first Gladiator, but it feels like Scott has been sitting on some of these ideas—the aforementioned rhino brawl, for instance—for quite a while. 

The results of this wish fulfillment are gladiatorial matches with jacked-up howler monkeys and ravenous sharks swimming alongside mock battleships in the flooded Colosseum. But for all the film’s visions, none are particularly visionary, and instead its cinematic pageantry feels mostly obligatory and devoid of any compelling internal conflict. It even looks like the first movie, an intuition confirmed by Gladiator cinematographer John Mathieson returning for the sequel. If spectacle is going to subsume any kind of historical weight or fun palace intrigue, then it has to feel fresh and meaningful. But nope.

Accordingly, Mescal plays New Gladiator as an empty vessel, a man who hates imperial Rome until he’s restored to his imperial lineage. He gives rousing speeches about the honor Rome once had—the honor it's now lost—and immediately one wonders what honor he's talking about. These other guys are hanging on his every word because he ripped a howler monkey’s throat out with his teeth? If only Mescal had an actual character to explore. But nope.

Gladiator II’s real charismatic core is Denzel Washington, an actor who chews through every moment both metaphorically and literally, because he always seems to be nibbling at something. It's captivating, if only because everyone around him—save Tim McInnerny’s horny doofus Senator Thraex—is so humorless. You’d think that such a role—that of a former slave who owns a stable of slaves, rising to power by means of the systems that have oppressed him—could afford a legendary Black actor an in-depth accounting of his own career, especially as he nears 70. But nope. Seeing Gladiator II doesn’t require much thinking at all. And we should expect so much more than that.

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Gladiator II opens to theaters in wide release Thurs Nov 22.