THE DREAM OF ROME

Gladiator II 🐱🐱🐱 🐣3 1/2 Maryellens

Paramount Pictures

The empire is in decline: Corruption flourishes, and violence spreads like a plague across the land. The halfwit on the throne, a vile libertine in a ridiculous blond wig who takes sick pleasure in people’s suffering, installs a monkey to run the state’s affairs.

Welcome to the United States in 2025.

I mean, Rome in 211 A.D. Historians began comparing the U.S. to Rome long before the Berlin Wall came down, ushering in the Pax Americana. But men more broadly became obsessed with Rome thanks at least partly to the legendary film director Ridley Scott. His Gladiator, which won Best Picture and four other Oscars in 2000, centered the ancient empire in the modern imagination. But returning to the Colosseum for the long-awaited sequel Gladiator II—I’m sorry, GladIIator—Scott has more than a contextual analogy to work with.

Call it a happy accident. He couldn’t have predicted that voters, in their infinite wisdom, would return to power a plainly demented, garishly blond, buffoonish con-artist who’s been convicted of 34 felonies and found liable for billion-dollar frauds and sexual abuse. But GladIIator’s brother emperors Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) and Geta (Joseph Quinn) bear an almost comical resemblance to our once and future president and his foolish but powerful enabler, Elon Musk. The Roman Senate, likewise, looks a lot like our Congress, bending over backward to relinquish power to these madmen. Saddest of all, the Roman public, like the blood-thirsty American electorate, is starving and angry but easily distracted by the circus.

The chaos is nudging the empire closer and closer to civil war, and that too feels awfully close to home. (Another film this year, the excellent and aptly named Civil War, dropped metaphor altogether and posited directly that civil strife was around the corner.) But there the parallels stop. For if America is heading for a rift, I can’t imagine where we’ll find our brave and brawny Hano, aka Lucius Verus Aurelius (Paul Mescal), to straddle the breach.

Anyhoo. Assuming you’ve recovered your bearings from November 5, you may find GladIIator’s politicssssssss—as Denzel Washington, playing the devious slaver Macrinus, puts it—fascinating.

You’ll also likely enjoy its marvelous action sequences, production design, and cinematography. The plot and dialogue definitely have problems; more on that in a minute. And Harry Gregson-Williams’s unoriginal score, filled with the clichéd keening of vaguely Middle Eastern women, is grating. But all in all, Scott here is much closer to the prolific genius who gave us Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, and The Martian than the slapdash dude behind the tonally uneven Napoleon and the execrable House of Gucci. GladIIator ought to make a lot of money and may even win some bling at the Oscars.

It’s been 25 years since Maximus (Russell Crowe) perished in the Colosseum, so Scott wisely gives us a brief recap of the earlier film, in a striking animated highlight reel that plays over the opening credits. It’s efficient, exposition-wise, but the stylistic choice—priming us to take much of what follows as another cartoon—suggests Scott is lowering the bar. And he is. GladIIator, fun as it is, has its cartoonish moments. Consider the climax of the movie, when young Lucius comes face to face with his long-lost mother, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), on the same spot where she lost Maximus 24 years ago. She cries out, “I never would have imagined the fates would lead us here!”

If she couldn’t imagine it, we certainly could. The fates (screenwriters David Scarpa and Peter Craig) haven’t taken any chances, re-creating Gladiator almost beat by beat. In both movies, the hero loses a huge opening battle and gets dragged to Rome as a slave. He’s forced into the arena by a charismatic showman and slays a slew of over-muscled monsters. Eventually he reconnects with Connie Nielsen and takes a stab at reforming the Roman body politic.

Thankfully, there are a lot of surprises along the familiar way, plenty of heart-pounding thrills, and some excellent acting, starting with our GladIIator. Mescal is awfully sexy in the roll, after piling on at least 20 pounds of hard muscle and bronzing it all under the Mediterranean sun. Yet he has an entirely different presence onscreen than Crowe did. “You have smoke,” Macrinus tells him. And Mescal definitely does, from a fire we can’t see. Once again, as in the brilliant Aftersun and All of Us Strangers, the actor is an exposed nerve.

This wounded vulnerability suits Lucius, who was cast into the wilds to fend for himself when he was still a boy. Back in the capital after being captured by General Acacius (Pedro Pascal) during the siege of Numidia (modern-day Tunisia), he’s after one thing only: vengeance for his wife, Arishat (Yuval Gonen), killed in the fight. The power and glory of his long-forgotten parents do not interest him in the least. I’m completely in the tank for Mescal (could you guess?), but my boy isn’t likely to win an Oscar as Russell Crowe did playing his father. (He ought to win something for this, however.) Unlike Maximus in Gladiator, Lucius—despite the juicy motive, magnetic eyes, and rippling muscles—is weirdly reactive throughout GladIIator.

His loss is Washington’s gain. The older actor doesn’t steal the movie; he doesn’t have to. Ridley and the writers have given it to him, making Macrinus, the gladiator-training slaver with designs on the throne, the plot’s prime mover. At first he seems to follow the same arc as Proximo (Carol Reed) in the first film, evolving from foe to friend to possible father figure. But later, without much warning, he takes a turn—and takes the film along with him.

Washington is terrific, giving his loosest, bravest performance in several decades as the gayish Macrinus. That’s right, as in many Disney cartoons the villain is queer, and like us, he’s hot for the hero: “Strong arms, good jaw, and a better smell,” he tells Lucius. I personally love a queer villain, even if I’m not supposed to. And I won’t begrudge Washington the Oscar nomination which seems imminent. (The positive notices must offer some salve to Washington’s ego, given the underwhelming response to the nepofest he produced this year: The Piano Lesson—co-written and directed by son Malcolm, starring son John David.)

But one thing does irk me: His feverish pronouncements in the press that not only is his character Macrinus bisexual, but he also had a gay kiss that landed on the cutting room floor! (Scott later contradicted this claim.) You will remember (or maybe you won’t) that Washington very publicly urged the young, pre-pugilistic Will Smith not to kiss a man in 1993’s Six Degrees of Separation. I know, it was 30 years ago, I should be more forgiving. Either Denzel has evolved, or he’s at least singing a tune to Oscar voters that gay folks everywhere can dance to. Whatever: He gas a blast in the part, and it shows.

The rest of the cast is excellent, too. The legendary Derek Jacobi, now 86 years old, is back from the first film and sharp as ever in his few pivotal scenes. Nielsen is terrific, though she spends most of her screentime standing by one loony emperor or another looking anguished. Thankfully, she was spared the really ghastly (but accurate) Roman updos most of the female extras wear. Pascal, building on his recent triumphs in Narcos, The Last of Us, and a dozen other things, has all the grit, gravitas, and world-weariness you could want in a Roman general. Truly, the Mescal-Pascal showdown in the Colosseum is the highlight of the film. These are two of the most pansexually beloved figures of our time—who the hell are we supposed to root for?

While we’re on the subject, a special bravo to Claire Simpson and Sam Restivo, the movie’s fight choreographers. The hand-to-hand combat throughout is top-notch. (Not so, the overly CGI animals that sometimes show up: In one silly scene in particular, the movie really, um, jumps the shark.) And I do wish filmmakers would figure out how to keep their leads visible in battle scenes without taking off their helmets. No one catapults up a fortress wall and dives into a swordfight without their helmet on. Well, I certainly don’t.

But all in all, GladIIator offers all the heart-pounding excitement and lavishly rendered spectacle you could want. Along with enough painterly touches to keep it intellectually interesting. Lucius’s dream of death is stunning, with the River Styx drawn in syrupy blacks and silvers. Later, Scott finds just the right way to reflect Maximus’s glory onto his son, using the dead man’s sword to light up Lucius’s face. There are lovely callouts not only to other Roman movies, in particular Kubrick’s Spartacus, but also to notable Roman poets. Virgil and Cicero make appearances, but also Catullus, whose most infamous poem—“I will sodomize you and face-fuck you”—appears in some graffiti. (In Latin, natch; GladIIator is not rated NC-17.)

That crassness suits the sleazy politics of the empire. “If your God is not with you, he is no God,” Lucius tells his troops in the opening battle. But truly, there are no Gods anywhere to be found here. Later, once he’s become an enslaved fighting animal and imbibed the violent cynicism of his captors, he sees things more clearly: “The people of Rome were raised by animals—it’s in their blood.” Promising him freedom, Macrinus thinks he knows what the future holds for his sexy slave. He quotes Cicero: “A slave dreams not of freedom, but of his own slaves.”

Do ideals have any allure in such a place? “The dream of Rome is fragile,” Lucius says. “You can only whisper it, or it will vanish.” Dispiriting but fitting words to hear just now, even in a swords-and-sandals epic. After all, on Inauguration Day, we may finally wake up from our American dream, possibly forever.