I was thinking a lot about men while watching Gladiator II last week, and so, it seemed, was everyone else. In the woozy, shell-shocked aftermath of the presidential election, as everyone scrambled for explanations as to why Donald Trump won so decisively, conversations turned toward men. Men who voted so differently than women, who are lashing out against feminism, and who, faced with a mainstream culture that no longer guarantees their dominance, would rather opt out, leaving them forever in peril of slipping down a digital manosphere pipeline that ends with them dumped at the goblinlike feet of Andrew Tate, who celebrated the presidential results by declaring that the patriarchy was back. How are we going to reach the men, pundits have been fretting, while a swath of liberals online have insisted that the answer is to engineer some kind of blue-state answer to Joe Rogan, never mind that Rogan himself would be unlikely to ascribe any committed political leaning to his podcast. In the midst of all of this, Ridley Scott’s sequel to his burly 2000 hit about a Roman general turned arena fighter is opening against Wicked like some Barbenheimer reprise — except that Gladiator II, despite its Best Picture–winning legacy, is so underwhelming that you might leave thinking, Huh, maybe masculinity really is in crisis.
I can’t say that the trouble all started when Hollywood ceded romanticized historical masculinity to RETVRN accounts that insist that brutalist architecture is bad and eating enormous amounts of raw liver is good. But I wouldn’t say that’s entirely inaccurate, either? The trick of movies like Gladiator and Master and Commander, which came out within ten years of each other during what now feels like the last stretch in which these sort of throwback epics consistently got traction with large audiences, is that their bloodshed and grand speeches provided shelter for a lot of sentimentality — about honor and dying for what you believe in, sure, but also about men unabashedly relishing the camaraderie of other men. I knew a guy in high school who would start tearing up when talking about Braveheart, which was a testament to the weepiness of Mel Gibson’s 1995 drama being as much a pull as the brutality of its battle sequences. Gladiator ends not with the body of Russell Crowe’s Maximus being lifted up in respect to his place as a soldier of Rome, but with fellow fighter Juba (Djimon Hounsou) burying his friend’s family keepsakes in the floor of the Colosseum and vowing that they’ll see each other again someday.
Alas, the closest thing that Gladiator II has to Juba is a character played by Peter Mensah, who dies as soon as the movie leaves Numidia, which is being attacked by Roman legions when it begins. That kingdom, on the north coast of Africa, is where the film’s exiled hero, Lucius, has ended up after secretly being sent out of Rome by his mother, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), after the death of his father, who, the sequel makes explicit, was Maximus. In the 2000 film, Lucius was portrayed by a young Spencer Treat Clark, while in the new one, he’s played by a requisitely beefed-up Paul Mescal in his first major studio role. The Irish actor, a usually intriguing presence, doesn’t hold the screen here so much as he vanishes into its tumult. Of all the ways in which he feels miscast, the most fatal may be his utter inability to seem like someone other guys would follow to their deaths. Mescal’s career to date has been heavily delineated by women — from his breakout role in the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People to the part in Charlotte Wells’s debut feature Aftersun that made him a critics’ favorite — and he has excelled at playing elusive objects of longing. But he’s terrible at giving the rousing speeches that were so iconic in Gladiator and that Gladiator II, which has a clunkier script written by David Scarpa, attempts to re-create. His instinct is to underplay these moments rather than bellow theatrically, which is a problem, especially when saddled with somewhat confusing slogans like “Where we are, death is not!”
It’s easier to imagine audiences snickering than weeping over Gladiator II — as the first film demonstrated, these movies require an earnestness that this new one simply cannot maintain. Instead, like Scott and Scarpa’s last collaboration, Napoleon, it tends to land in an uneasy place between inadvertent and intentional funniness. Fred Hechinger, playing half of a pair of tyrannical twin emperors with Joseph Quinn, gives a performance so outsize that it turns his every scene into a joke. Denzel Washington fares a lot better as scheming villain Macrinus, turning out some pleasingly unpredictable line readings (I was partial to “I own … your house. I want … your loyalty”) and flashing a wolfish grin as he starts to realize the slave he bought to fight is far more valuable than he could have dreamed. While Lucius is the designated heir to Rome and to the franchise, Macrinus has a backstory so much more compelling that you start to root for his relentless climb to the top, particularly given Lucius’s reluctance to step up to leadership or acknowledge the position that his mother and her husband, the general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal, in a kind of substitute Crowe role), have been put in. Macrinus is, at least, self-motivated, while Lucius reads as indifferent until the script requires him to make an abrupt shift in loyalties. When Macrinus talks about the rage he sees in his new fighter, it takes all of Washington’s powers to deliver an observation that’s patently untrue. Lucius, at best, looks like someone engaged in a prolonged sulk.
I didn’t adore Gladiator, but I appreciated the melodramatic conviction at its core, the way it was unabashedly emotional about grief and justice and restoring order to the world. Gladiator II echoes elements from the first film, including talk of the “dream of Rome” as a more egalitarian place, but while that idea is more central to the plot in the sequel, it feels even more abstract. Rome in this film isn’t solid enough to require saving or destruction — it’s a series of historical interiors the characters pass through. It’s only when characters fight that the movie comes alive. The best battle sequence is the agitated opening one, when Marcus leads a fleet of ships to conquer Numidia, raising built-in towers for his army to scale the walls and kill the soldiers trying to defend it, among them Lucius’s archer wife. There are also Colosseum clashes involving a rhino-as-steed and a re-creation of a naval battle that involves flooding the arena. Scott, the old pro, knows how to give these scenes a vicious vitality that overcomes any thoughts about how the Romans supposedly got live sharks in the water. But the thrill of the action sequences just underscores the hollowness of the rest of the enterprise. Sure, not all of us spend a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire, but those who do deserve better than this.
