SCREEN SHOT - Gladiator 2

It's a Ridley Scott movie. So this sequel to Gladiator from 2000, twenty five years ago, is a somewhat overdue follow up that manages to tick all the right blockbuster boxes. Huge sets, strikingly staged moments, battle scenes and gladiator fights. If there is one thing that Ridley Scott knows how to do in spades is please his audience. Plus gathering a very respectable ensemble of actors. He obviously hoped to lure Russell Crowe back to do some flashback type moments, because the film is littered with edits of him from the first movie. This does highlight one of the failings of this movie, that it does rely too much on basking in the glory that was Gladiator. 

From the first movie Scott has brought back Connie Neilson, and gives a cameo role to Derek Jacobi apparently simply in order to kill him off spectacularly. So there is a nod to continuity between the two films. Gladiator 2 is certainly much much bloodier than its predecessor, hands are lopped off, heads are sawn off in front of your eyes, so there is a huge amount of more gratuitous violence. But the structure of the narrative is basically another spin of the same story arc, but with a fresh set of actors, which is something Scott appears to do with some regularity, if you look at Alien and its recent prequels.

What Gladiator 2 has in spades is grandeur and spectacle, it takes the first movie and turns the dial up a few notches. Booking Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal to play the two central leads was a good move. Both are still on an upward career trajectory, so appearing in this blockbuster will do both of them a lot of good in terms of the future films they get offered. So far Mescal has triumphed hugely within smaller scale independent films. But here he takes on a bigger character who has to appear to posses the same leadership qualities as his dead father ie Russell Crowe. I think Mescal does just about hold his own, using his lower vocal register more, looking more haggard, toning down his geniality and charming twinkling smile of his. And of course he's done the now ubiquitous bulking up, learnt how to ride a horse, and be flashily lethal with a sword. 

The real star of this movie is Denzel Washington, who steals almost every scene he is in. The character he plays Macrinus, an ex slave, now slave owner and gladiator owner, who is now using or creating unstable situations, through which to climb the greasy pole to political influence in Rome. Denzel plays Macrinus with all the intelligent charm you'd expect, but with an undertow of menace and manipulation of people to advance his own power. His is the only acting performance that truly grabs the movie and makes it entirely his own, in the same way Crowe did in the first movie.

This is a more than satisfactory and efficient sequel, one that fulfills most of your expectations of it. It is a bit mechanical in the way it lovingly recycles its tropes, which I think does prevent it from being as majestically a great movie as its first iteration. It has its weirdly off kilter moments like the gladiator fight with seemingly 'genetically' modified apes. But Mescal buffed up and in armour, what's there not to like?

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8