Are you not entertained? No, I wasn’t.
File under sequels no one asked for. Cross file under no CGI baboons were injured in the writing of this review.
Admittedly, it’s been 25 years since I saw Gladiator. So it might not be as good or impactful a movie as I remember it to be. And right now, having suffered through its utterly unnecessary sequel – oh so cleverly titled with the Roman numeral “II” – I don’t know that I ever have any desire to watch the original again.
What’s next? Titanic 2, Under the Sea?
I found this movie interminably boring – as if Director Ridley Scott had consulted with the George Lucas who thought the prequels to Star Wars should focus on a galactic civics lesson. I think there was a clever idea here, yearning to breathe free, in a script that was somehow simultaneously underbaked and overwritten, but all of the soap opera palace intrigue, coupled with relentlessly grim, poorly staged fight scenes, made it nearly impossible to find any nuggets of gold.
The one actor who didn’t make me want to gouge my own eyes out was Pedro Pascal, primarily because he had a look on his face the entire time like he was searching for the emergency exit.
Our eponymous protagonist Paul Mescal has a fabulous presence – and he has a profile that most assuredly belongs on a Roman coin – but that’s about the sum of it. I don’t blame him entirely. The script doesn’t give him much to work with, but he also seemed entirely too bored to bring any kind of emotional resonance to the series of unfortunate events befalling him throughout the film. Loss of a spouse? Shrug. Revelation that his lineage isn’t what he thought it was? Shrug. Rammed by a poorly digitally rendered attack rhino? Shrug.
And Denzel Washington? A performance that gobsmackingly is generating Oscar talk? Imagine Iago played by one of the lesser-known contestants from RuPaul‘s Drag Race. The one good line he has – “Violence is the universal language” – pretty much sums up the movie’s raison d’être. Like 2.5 hours of WWE Smackdown with more blood and less joy.
I honestly don’t have the energy or heart to write anything sensibly about this film. It is a turgid mess, akin to just about any poorly conceived 1950s sword and sandal epic you might’ve watched on a random weekday afternoon when you had the stomach flu as a kid. I kept waiting for Charlton Heston and Jean Simmons to make a surprise return-from-the-dead appearance, riding on the back of a cartoonish sea monster.
I do believe there was an intention here to use the fall of the Roman empire as some kind of on-the-nose analogy for present day American political turmoil. But for my money, and I can’t believe I’m typing this sentence, that allegory is far more effectively achieved in Wicked. So go see that instead.
At least that flick has the presence of mind to bring you a snappy show tune every 18 minutes. Even if you lose out on the sight of seeing an army of CrossFit gym bros in leather tunics.
Postscript text from my dad: “And my title ‘When will this be over?’”
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