Gladiator II review: Paul Mescal is no Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott’s disappointing sequel

Rhinos and sharks and baboons, oh my! Through the mighty Colosseum gates of Gladiator II races a menagerie of digital attractions, charging and gnashing unnaturally like escapees from Jumanji. Are you not entertained? For the less zoologically fixated, there are other bids for applause: catapults raining fire from Jupiter’s stratosphere; massive, groaning ships drifting across open sea and a flooded arena; and that familiar collision of armed bodies on a stretch of ashen battlefield — the trustiest proof that Ridley Scott, a war buff with the budget to realize his grandest flights of historical inaccuracy, has stepped again behind the camera to fling more mud and viscera at its lens. 

It’s been a quarter of a century since his Gladiator re-popularized swords and sandals, and won a few Oscars for its trouble. Back at last in Ancient Rome, Scott does as the Romans did, doubling down on the bread-and-circus excess. Gladiator II operates by an emperor’s logic of eternal escalation, of more always being more. But there’s one thing this belated, ungainly sequel can’t deliver in new force — or at all, in fact — and that’s the anchoring star power of Russell Crowe, whose vengefully driven Maximus hit the dirt hard at the climax of the original. You don’t realize just how much his steely magnetism was the real draw of Gladiator, maybe the whole show, until you’ve seen Paul Mescal try to fill its absence.

The Normal People star is Lucius, another “husband to a murdered wife,” another soldier conscripted into bondage and forced to swing a blade before the hoi polloi to win his freedom. If the name rings a bell, that’s because Lucius was a boy in Gladiator, the son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, the only actor from the older film who reprises her role in this new one) and maybe — just maybe — another character we’ve met. Sent away to Africa for his own safety, he’s returned to Rome grown and in chains, the new prized champion of Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a former slave turned slaver and a schemer plotting schemes.

“Rage pours out of you like milk,” waxes Washington — an odd turn of phrase, and odder still when applied to the particular hero he’s addressing. Rage pours out of this guy? Mescal, who’s been plenty captivating playing Gen Z lost souls floundering on the brink of despair in movies like Aftersun and All of Us Strangers, never comes close to conveying the fiery fury that Crowe evinced from his eyes, tightened tendons, and every pore. Lucius, our understudy Maximus, mostly appears peeved. Even equipped with pounds of extra muscle, he looks like a stiff breeze might knock him flat on his back. He’s too… contemporary. Half the time, you expect him to ask someone if he can crash on their couch for a few days.

The script by David Scarpa, who wrote Scott’s previous Drunk History lesson, Napoleon, introduces one novel wrinkle. This time, the target of the gladiator’s campaign for revenge is a halfway noble guy: Lucilla’s loving husband and the conflicted Roman general, Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal, of relevant Game of Thrones fame), who’s secretly plotting to unseat the vain, cruel emperors (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger). Splitting our allegiances, The Fugitive-style, is intriguing… or it would be, if Gladiator II had the Don King sense to ramp melodramatically up to Mescal vs. Pascal. But their inevitable showdown disappears into a needlessly convoluted tangle of subplots.

Nor is Pascal bringing the goods. His oddly professorial Marcus comes across like another poor substitute for Maximus, as unconvincing as Mescal when delivering locker-room pep talks to his loyally amassed troops. It’s as if Gladiator II equally distributed the powerhouse presence of Maximus to two actors; cram them together on the same scale and they might come closer to matching Crowe’s gravitas. The same franchise arithmetic doesn’t favor Quinn and Hechinger, doing a fey double act of contrasting despotic worminess, because two pathetic tyrants are better than one, right? The sum of these regressively effeminate caricatures doesn’t equal the delicious villainy Joaquin Phoenix brought to Gladiator.

The only actor in Gladiator II who seems determined to upstage the bombastic CGI combat is Washington, naturally. Cast in the beefed up Oliver Reed role — before the film reconfigures his position on the antagonism spectrum — Denzel tackles his Machiavellian power broker with the crooked levity of a bored monarch doing self-amusing shtick to pass the hours. He grazes accents, never really committing to one. He uses a severed head as a comic prop. He flashes those famous pearly whites, a tiger’s grin as threatening as the ones the Christians in the arena face. Washington is such a casual hoot that it takes a while to realize that he’s playing a character whose motivations never really crystallize.

Scarpa’s narrative lacks the rousing simplicity of Gladiator, a pumped-up crowdpleaser whose veneer of Oscar-friendly prestige couldn’t disguise what was essentially a glorified sports drama, tracking an almanac legend’s upward climb from gladiatorial Rookie of the Year to throat-slicing Heavyweight Champion. Gladiator II mucks up that trajectory with too much muddled palace intrigue, too many unpersuasive speeches about the importance of the republic, and a climactic mano-a-mano with none of the personal stakes of the original’s.

This leaves only the clash of Colosseum titans. To say that Gladiator II remains true to the chaotic spirit of its predecessor in this department is not really a compliment. The dirty secret is that Scott’s Y2K sensation was exciting almost in spite of its action, a choreographed flurry of spectator-sport violence cut to ribbons for the sake of supposed urgency. Two-plus decades of nigh-incomprehensible Hollywood swordplay can be traced back to those pageants of blood and sand. With Gladiator II, Scott returns to the scene of the crime, armed with a bigger effects budget and a mandate to top his last swing for the bloodthirsty cheap seats. He’s made a blockbuster as bloated and decadent as the city it depicts.

To reach the cornball heights of Gladiator, it would need what Crowe brought to the table — that quicksilver fusion of sorrow and anger that elevated him from great actor to movie star overnight, even as it blurred the line between those distinctions. In true legacy-sequel fashion, Gladiator II knows all too well what it’s missing; just as Crowe casts a long shadow over the cast, so does Lucius strain to live up to the legacy of Maximus. Scott isn’t above simply cutting to footage from the first movie — and, in the home stretch, actually recycling an iconic music cue, too. Without a star who can summon a little more of that Crowian command, it’s a fool’s errand. Sad to say, no one is unleashing hell at Mescal’s signal.

Gladiator II is now playing in theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.