Gladiator II
- Directed by: Ridley Scott
- Starring: Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, Connie Nielsen, Pedro Pascal
- Action/Drama | R | 2 hr 28 min
By Reed Ripley
Gladiator II releasing the same weekend as Wicked presents a fascinating juxtaposition of two highly anticipated films. Both have been decades in the making. Gladiator II follows Gladiator’s Best Picture run in 2000, and Wicked follows the fourth longest running Broadway production of all time and counting. Both films attempt to recreate their predecessors’ success, but where Wicked’s reproduction ultimately succeeded, Gladiator II’s failed.
Interestingly, the two film’s creative approaches were very similar—take the established blueprint and repackage it for a 2024 audience, both visually and narratively. Both films succeeded in the former with generally excellent production design (notwithstanding a few noticeable CGI misfires), but the films deviated wildly on the latter. Arguably, Wicked’s job was easier—the musical’s book and proven pop bangers were right there, and it would’ve been massively difficult to screw up.
However, you could make the same argument for Gladiator II—have four-to-five incredible set pieces in the Coliseum and fill in the rest with a simple plot that drives the audience toward each in succession. Yet, Gladiator II desperately wants to be more than that to its massive detriment.
Simply put, the script is terrible. There are two components to any good script—obviously, the actual words are important, but equally as important, if not more so, is the connective tissue that grabs the audience and makes them invest. Gladiator II fails on both counts. The dialogue itself is mostly forgettable and sometimes actively cringy, and the connective tissue is overstuffed with exposition at the cost of a severe lack of character development. Honestly, the only character that invokes some sort of emotion is a well-cast white-headed capuchin monkey, and that’s a tough place to be in a film starring Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, and Denzel Washington.
Those failings in writing cause Gladiator II to drag tremendously, and it feels every bit of 148 minutes. It’s extremely frustrating because almost everything else about the film works, at least theoretically. It’s a great cast, but no one’s able to rise above the hand they’re dealt, and the classic Ridley Scott production design and accompanying attention to detail are there in spades. And to be clear, the set pieces are still very entertaining, which makes about an hour of the film imminently entertaining. But are those set pieces worth sitting through the other truly rough hour and a half to see? No, and it’s a shame.