‘Gladiator II’: Sequels are almost never better. Confirmed

Ridley Scott will go down in movie history in capital letters for many reasons. The most unquestionable is that he kicked off his career with three almost consecutive masterpieces. I never tire of watching and listening to, even if I know them by heart, The Duellists, Alien and Blade Runner. Scott could have said: “I’ll leave it at that, because after these three wonders, I’m retiring.” But he continued to make a lot of films and also produced other people’s movies, conceiving cinema as a great spectacle. His long career has contained everything: forgettable films, successes, poor art, deserved failures. He has also demonstrated his authorship with powerful works that have been enjoyed by the general public, one of his legitimate, permanent and commendable yearnings. For example, the hit movies Thelma and Louise, American Gangster, The Last Duel and Gladiator.

I imagine that the commercial and artistic success of that Roman general called Maximus Decimus Meridius, who managed to survive the infamy perpetrated against him and his family by a psychopathic and sadistic emperor, becoming the king of the gladiators with the vibrant motto “Strength and honor,” is the main driving force behind telling the story of his heir. That is, for the money, anticipating a huge box office return in times of crisis, something vital for the continued operation of the opulent factory he runs.

And Scott is likely to succeed in his main objective. But here strength and honor are non-existent, the script (which was not penned by the same gentlemen who wrote the first Gladiator) is as nonsensical as it is unintentionally comical (alas, the Roman Colosseum turned into a shark-infested pool!), and the descendant of Connie Nielsen’s princess is foolishly predictable, played without flair by the bland protagonist Paul Mescal (who is a far cry from Russell Crowe, with his fascinating presence and voice).

Battles are resolved with officiousness, devoid of any magnetic pull, either in the story itself or in how it is told, and the script is full of caricatures like the two emperors of Rome: remarkably moronic brothers with the questionably exotic names Geta and Caracalla. They are insipid, and not at all sophisticated. They have a devious manipulation specialist at their side who is one of the few things that pulled me out of the doldrums, as he is played by such a strong actor as Denzel Washington.

A sympathetic friend of mine does not understand why this so-called spectacle elicited so much boredom in me. He told me: “It’s just another Roman movie, like all of them, neither better nor worse.” I had to remind him that the epic and magnificent Spartacus and Ben-Hur also belonged to that genre. And the first Gladiator. How I feared that the incomparable The Godfather would spawn a sequel. But Coppola proved that you could be sublime with continuity: Godfather 2 was stunning. Shakespeare would have identified with it. The third installment was also very good: it did not reach the level of its predecessors, although its final act was unbeatable.

And I suspect that if the business works out for him, Scott will already be thinking about making a third Gladiator. Or five. He’s 86 years old. His previous film, Napoleon, was as pretentious as it was boring. However, the factory needs to be fed. It would be desirable that he does so with better films, at the height of the intelligence he displayed in his three early triumphs.

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