'Gladiator II' Is Solid But Man Do I Wish It Was Better
Like most people reading this, the original Gladiator is one of my favorite movies. So the moment it was announced this movie was in the works, hype level went up to a 10. Here are my thoughts and, as always, I'll break it down into a simple pro and con list.
PROS:
- There are 3 actors that really impress me in this movie. Denzel Washington, Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger. After seeing the trailers, I was nervous bout Denzel's accent/character arc but he absolutely crushes it. Quinn and Hechinger are also great as dual fill-ins for the legendary Joaquin Phoenix performance as Commodus.
- The production value is there! The CGI rarely looks wonky, plenty of big practical sets that help immerse you as well.
- The fight sequences are all pretty awesome. I wouldn't say anything is better than the action from the original but nothing is much worse.
CONS:
- Paul Mescal was a really bad fit for this role in my opinion. The character of Lucius is written to give an inspirational speech every 5 minutes, lead men and generally be a mans man like Maximus was in the first movie. Mescal is just not built for that. He is a fantastic actor but this was just square-box-round-hole to me.
- The story is bad. Real bad. Like, lifted from a fan fiction reddit level bad. Not nearly as bad as Ridley's original script, but very uninspired, messy stuff. And the dialogue does no favors to any of the actors.
- Pedro Pascal was a non-factor in this movie. This is one of the hottest names in Hollywood and he was only afforded what felt like 20 lines.
SUMMARY:
The shiny parts of this movie work and satiate the dumb parts of your brain. However, I think the biggest fault of this movie lies in the story. It feels like Scott knew he wanted Lucius to be a Gladiator but wanted to try his hardest to keep the rest of the plot different from the original. I think that was a mistake because the plot they landed on really lacks cohesion which hurts the development of all the characters which hurts my ability as an audience member to get invested at the same level I was with Maximus in the first movie.
SHOULD YOU WATCH THIS IN THEATERS?
Yes. It's a good theater experience and I had a lot of fun despite it's flaws. I'm gonna take a massive leap here and guess that Ridley Scott has a directors cut in the tank that is going to correct a lot of the issues I had in an expanded runtime.