I seem to make a habit of reviewing Ridley Scott movies so I suppose I'd better give Gladiator II a go. This review is spoiler-free.
In a nutshell, it's good. You will be entertained. Is it great ? Nope. It doesn't compare with the first movie, and if you expect it to be of the same stature, you'll come out twisted and bitter and spitting bile at the world. If, however, you just want a decent movie, you'll have a nice time. It is in fact a perfectly decent action movie, but it's not anything like the gripping drama that was Gladiator.
To me it felt like what would happen if you gave an unlimited budget to a made-for-TV movie. It would be easy to write a pretentious, technically-oriented critique of the problems of the movie that would come out as an absolutely scathing review, and to be honest I'm a bit surprised I haven't seen more of those. But this would also be a bit of an unfair thing to do.
There are few things the movie actually does badly. There are a good many things it does adequately, and a few it does brilliantly. Overall, the positives outweigh the negatives. Its flaws are not so much what it does wrong as what it doesn't develop sufficiently. Very few things indeed are outright bad but a good many miss their full potential... I, for one, am very intrigued to see if there's a director's cut. Ideally, this should be at least another hour longer, but probably better if it was two.
That is... the butter has been spread too thin here. While it is sometimes too much of a remake rather than a sequel, with too many obvious "we just rewrote the line from the first movie" incidents, there's also plenty of new and potentially interesting material. The main character's initial primary nemesis both symbolises everything our protagonist hates about Rome but is himself also fighting to Make Rome A Great Republic Again, which could have added some very interesting character dynamics, but... didn't. Ultimately the relationship falls flat because there's just not enough time to do anything with it.
The main problem is that there's just too much stuff. There are too many characters, to the level the main characters are all relegated essentially to the screen time normally expected of of secondary characters, and the secondary characters to that of walk-on parts. Consequently there are some scenes that could be epic but fail to stick the landing; what should be a fine blade turns out to have a dull edge. There's little at stake emotionally. We just aren't given enough time to learn why we should care about the characters; paradoxically, the plot seems to be diluted by scenes which don't really seem to add anything terribly important to the narrative. A lot of it honestly feels like filler : not actually bad, in fact perfectly enjoyable to watch, but just not really needed.
Gladiator, by contrast, had an edge of the utmost clarity the whole way through. It was, to be fair, a simpler tale, but also a more complete one. The backstory was sufficiently told through dialogue without being exposition. It's immediately clear that Marcus Aurelius and Maximus were the good guys and Commodus the villain, with the others being a little bit more shades-of-grey (especially Quintus) but all their roles being immediately clear. For instance, we see Maximus acting with courage and honour from the word go and then we see Commodus betray him. The source of his rage and charisma are instantly apparent. We know what they're about and their motivations are understood.
Not so in Gladiator II. We're essentially dropped into the middle of the character's life with little or no explanation as to who he is or what he's doing there. He apparently has the respect of his men but this isn't really very well demonstrated, and to be honest, the actor is a bit flat and the dialogue sometimes a bit off. It isn't bad, by any means. But it could have been better.
Visually it's a similar story. In some ways it's an absolute visual treat, but it never really crosses the boundary from "cool-looking special effects" to "looks like it was actually filmed in ancient Rome" (though the visuals of the cityscapes are probably the best depictions of classical Rome I've ever seen). Again, there's just too much stuff here. Gladiator's opening battle was almost entirely physical effects, and consequently it might have only been 10 minutes long but they were 10 absolutely outstanding minutes. Gladiator 2 has tonnes of spectacle, loads more than Gladiator, but only occasionally does it reach the standards of its predecessor.
One of the things that I found most off was Connie Nielsen's accent. "He was a solider of Rome", she says at the end of the first movie with the pronunciation of the "they mostly come at night, mostly" girl from Aliens. It was almost to the point of being mock-British but delivered with huge charisma. Here, she's become faux-American, her stern demeanour replaced with something softer and less interesting, and her accent just... off. Her character, as well as a certain other well-known name from the first movie, isn't given anything like the narrative they deserve.
Denzel Washington's performance has received a lot of high praise, and his acting is, well, it's Denzel Washington. But like all the other characters, he's doing potentially interesting things but not in terribly interesting ways. It's a good role but not a great one. Likewise the dual emperors. To have autocratic rulers who are actually insane is an incredibly topical, err, topic, but we don't actually need there to be two of them : again, things are spread too thin. Yes yes, I know there were two emperors in reality, but Gladiator's strength came from chucking out historical accuracy in favour of a clear narrative and historical plausibility. The sequel has a clear narrative but it's lost the time to develop what's actually interesting about it, while still not gaining anything of any significance in terms of accuracy.
Which brings me to my final point : it doesn't really follow on all that naturally from the first movie. Gladiator ends very satisfyingly, whereas here the subsequent developments feel a bit forced. Not implausible by any means, but the first just didn't give any clue that any of this was likely. Again, this could potentially be remedied with extra sequences to explain just how the death of Commodus affected the political structure of the Empire; it isn't at all clear what went wrong with the plan to restore power to the Senate. That's a pretty gaping plot hole. Sure, it might be more accurate, but I took it as a given that Gladiator was postulating what could have happened rather than what did. To now revert to something very much closer to historical accuracy is as jarring as the more frequent opposite case. If you establish that a story is pure fiction, to try and bring it back to reality is as odd as if you tried to make a documentary suddenly veer into fantasy.
As I said, if I were to treat this like a proper critic, I'd probably hate it. But I don't hate it at all, I rather enjoyed it... because it was fun. It was entertaining. Ultimately, it got the job done. It's lighter entertainment than a Gladiator sequel deserves, but it's still solid light entertainment.
