Gladiator II

While I've not seen every Best Picture Oscar winner, I've seen almost all of them, and I can state unequivocally that, in my opinion, the worst film ever to win the Motion Picture Academy's top honor is Ridley Scott's abysmal 2000 sword-and-sandal epic Gladiator. Duller than The Broadway Melody, with worse acting than Cavalcade, it is less substantive than The Greatest Show on Earth or Around the World in 80 Days, more tiresome than The Great Ziegfeld or Out of Africa, and more up its own ass than The English Patient, Crash, American Beauty, and Braveheart combined. Gladiator is a nearly unwatchable work of muddy-then-suddenly crispt CGI visuals and unforgivably atrocious performances. It's the peak of Ridley Scott's shitty historical pictures, which range from his first feature, the beautiful but stupid The Duelists, to his most recent feature, the ugly and 1000 times more stupid Napoleon. Scott seems to possess such a distaste for history that all his historical films come off as if he's trying to settle a score with some mean schoolmaster who made him feel like an idiot when he was in his early teens. His contempt for the study of ancient civilizations comes through in 1492: Conquest of Paradise, Kingdom of Heaven, Exodus: Gods and Kings, and, of course, Gladiator. All of these movies appear to be made with a strident belief that the only accurate way to tell a historical fiction is through the perspective of an incurious adolescent boy who loves to see people's heads getting cut off.

The exception that proved this rule was Scott's 2021 film The Last Duel, written by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Nicole Holofcener. That movie was still full of intentional anachronisms and juvenile humor but approached its narrative and themes with a modicum of intelligence and wit to the point where I could enjoy it for what it was. Surprisingly, I'll say the same about Gladiator II, which is far less pretentious and boring than its predecessor and features characters and performances I found sufficiently entertaining. Though it takes place just fifteen years or so after the events of the first Gladiator, tells the story of the son of that film's protagonist, and features a couple of the same actors reprising their roles, Gladiator II plays much less like a sequel or legasequel to Gladiator and more like a fresh and entertaining update on the typical sword and sandal epic Hollywood use to crank out by the dozens (which is what the first film should have felt like). While hardly in the same league as the 1960 Oscar-winner Spartacus, Gladiator II has more in common with Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick's wonderfully junky 70mm epic than Scott's pompous and puerile prior visit to this material.

Russel Crow's iconic line in the first film was, "Are you not entertained?!" to which I could answer with a resounding, "No!" The most fun I had atGladiatorwas turning to my partner at the end and quipping, "Glad it's over," which isn't even all that funny but was still wildly more inventive than anything I'd just sat through. The story of the first film follows one of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius's most trusted generals and advisors, Maximus Decimus Meridius (Crowe), who, after escaping execution ordered by the late emperor's devious son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), is forced to become a gladiator battling to the death in the coliseum for the amusement of the Roman citizenry. Few of the characters from that story survive, thank the Gods, as almost every actor is dreadful in that picture, from the leaden Crowe to Phoenix giving one of the worst performances of any professional actor in any medium, to the usually dependable British stalwarts like Richard Harris, Derek Jacobi, and Oliver Reed. Reed gave part of his over-the-top performance from the grave after he died of a heart attack mid-shooting and had to have his face digitally superimposed on a body double—a novel concept 24 years ago.

This picture tells the story of Lucius Verus Aurelius, grandson of Marcus Aurelius and son of Maximus and Queen Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, back for Part II). Lucius is played by indie-darling Paul Mescal (The Lost Daughter, Aftersun, All of Us Strangers), and he's an odd choice for the role of an unstoppable rage-filled warrior. His counterpart in the Roman army is General Acacius, Lucilla's husband, who trained under Maximus and now wins many campaigns for the new twin Emperors Geta and Caracalla despite his dislike of them. Acacius is played by Pedro Pascal (Triple Frontier, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Drive-Away Dolls, who is better known for TV shows like The Mandalorian and The Last of Us). Like Mescal, Pascal is hardly the guy you think of to play an undefeated general, but he plays the character's brooding reluctance well. As the simpering little twin Ceasers, Fred Hechinger and Joseph Quinn do a decent job playing something that feels like it exists in the same universe as Phoenix's Commodus but manages to be credible as characters.

Movies like this live and die by how good their villains are more than their heroes—which is one of the main reasons the first film is so bad. Hechinger and Quinn get far less screen time than Phoenix did, thank the Gods, but they do a little bit more with what they get. How good they are is of little matter since the real villain, and perhaps the true hero of Gladiator II, is Denzel Washington. He plays Macrinus, a former slave turned gladiator trainer and arms dealer who plans to one day control Rome. I had no idea who Washington would play in this picture, but I certainly wasn't expecting this. His Macrinus is as if Peter Ustinov's Batiatus from Spartacus was not only the sardonic scene-stealing comic relief but also a movie-stealing, empire-stealing master manipulator miscreant. It actually serves the picture that most of the main characters are somewhat poorly cast, as this not only enables Washington to run away with the movie, it keeps the narrative from feeling predictable. I found myself intrigued with where this story was going to go, as it seemed like it wasn't really the traditional tale of a "chosen one" fated to lead his people to victory or of a gifted young man from a simple background who turns out to be of royal descent and fated to lead his people to victory. The focus keeps shifting from character to character, making none of them seem like the actual protagonist. This may not be great storytelling, and this movie is still filled with bad CGI and silly, who-gives-a-fuck-about-histrical-accurcy choices, but I was entertained.