Gladiator 2

Many years after the brave gladiator Maximus completed his revenge and died in the process, things have not improved much in Rome. Pentecostal Lucius Verus has disappeared, the megalomania and appetite for power of Rome's tyrannical twin emperors can only be satiated with blood, and thousands of young soldiers are forced to go to war to continue conquering kingdoms. The Senate plots with the beloved General Acacius (Pedro Pascal), and meanwhile, a mysterious barbarian enters the political arena (Paul Mescal), an enslaved gladiator named Hanno who also thirsts for retribution and must face his dark past in order to change the future of Rome.

The sequel to one of Ridley Scott's very best films, something I could never have imagined even 10 years ago, serves up everything you could expect from a bloody, historically rooted epic. There's plenty of vicious killings, there are massive battles, blood-spattered sand arenas, and brutal betrayal. It should be a recipe for an emotional film experience, but the emotions are absent. Unlike Scott's older masterpiece, you're left cold and unmoved in the cinema, where nothing manages to tug at your heart strings. You are often reminded of the original, whose unforgettable scenes have been edited in to remind viewers how great that film was.

The sequel is not really bad in itself, in fact, it's a very entertaining film. After a slow start that picks up during a siege, the film improves once Denzel Washington's gladiatorial sponsor is well and truly established and despite early concerns that Washington would "phone it in", the fact is that he is the sequel's big draw. He's the film's single best character and Pascal's bitter war general isn't far from that honour either.

If it's blood-spattering gladiatorial games you're after as a viewer, this film will entertain royally, as you feel like a Roman resident in the audience, who just wants to see heads fly. For example, my favourite sequence involves a gang of rabid baboons straight out of a horror movie and it gets particularly, and delightfully, brutal towards the third act of the film. But as soon as the gladiatorial games are over, the fun is often over too, because then follow more repetitive scenes where characters go behind each other's backs. Emotionally, the film runs on empty and Scott seems, oddly, to put far too little effort into the emotional worlds of the characters, where most of it just falls flat.

The script is tight and I actually like the plot, but the mystery element of the film makes the plot more sprawling than thrilling. It also doesn't help that the film series' new protagonist is so dreary. Mescal looks most bored when his loved ones are snatched from his life and completely lacks charisma once he takes a leadership role in the slave tunnels. It's hard to match Russell Crowe's fantastic performance, but where characters see some kind of "anger" in the protagonist's eyes, I see more of an irritation at losing his favourite sandal in the gladiatorial arena.

I suppose it's inevitable not to be slightly disappointed, although I wasn't really expecting anything great from this sequel. Gladiator II is an entertaining Roman epic that probably could have worked better as a more standalone action film, because as a sequel it unfortunately has the misfortune of contending with the mighty original. It's a perfectly fine film in its own right that has plenty of brains, but less heart. When Scott does decide to reuse the heart-breaking music from the original in the film's final scene, it feels more like putting a plaster over a gunshot wound in an attempt to patch up the film's out-of-tune emotional strands, and not a worthy sequel to one of the most spectacular Hollywood films of the 2000s.