Gladiator 2 is the sequel that no one asked for to a much-beloved, Oscar award-winning film. Surprising no one, it is replete with Star Wars-esque shoe-horned family ties which motivate its macho Paul Mescal protagonist character. The spectacular scenes are all completely spoiled by the trailer: the hungry, hungry sharks in the Colosseum and the siege sequence are highlights and everything else is sort of a letdown from there. Denzel Washington’s character steals the show–the guy made out with someone for a scene and they didn’t even include it in the final cut! But what is truly extraordinary is how much more of a monkey in a toga there is in this film than you think there’s going to be. At first, it feels like just a little bit of a visual gag and then he keeps. Coming. Back. It’s like he’s crawling the ladder of power progressively higher and higher until he becomes a named character and even then he’s sort of responsible for the fall of Rome? “Watching the sequel and then the original in reverse order is the right move,” Friend mentions, in order to correctly build your appetite for blood and over-the-top acting, while also getting the requisite amount of monkey in toga that you need to sustain yourself over six hours of viewing.
My biggest problem was that Paul Mescal’s character is a mary-sue. He can sword fight, he can navy fight, he can chariot fight. Literally, no obstacles for him to overcome. The movie focused on the wrong character. Denzel is who we should have been following.
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