Ridley Scott returns to the Colosseum with Gladiator II, the sequel to his 2000 hit, and it arrives with the same tagline promise: “Prepare to be entertained.” It mostly keeps that promise. It does not keep much else.
The film runs 148 minutes. It is an action, adventure and drama picture, directed and produced by Scott, written by David Scarpa from a story he wrote with Peter Craig, produced by Scott Free Productions and Red Wagon Entertainment, and distributed by Paramount Pictures. Paul Mescal leads. Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger and Connie Nielsen fill out the top of the bill. Derek Jacobi returns.
Trailer, via Paramount Pictures.
A Follow-Up First Discussed in June 2001
A sequel to Gladiator was discussed as early as June 2001. David Franzoni and John Logan were set to return as screenwriters. Over the following years Scott offered occasional updates, including the possible involvement of Russell Crowe and plot ideas about the Roman afterlife and different historical periods. Development stopped when DreamWorks Pictures was sold to Paramount in 2006.
The film was finally announced in 2018. Mescal was cast in the lead in January 2023, working from Scarpa’s script. Shooting ran from June 2023 to January 2024, with a five-month delay caused by the 2023 Hollywood labor disputes. Gladiator II premiered in Sydney, Australia, on October 30, 2024.
That is a long road to a movie that spends its first act retracing the first movie’s steps. Sixteen years after the death of Marcus Aurelius, Rome is ruled by the twin emperors Caracalla and Geta. In the North African kingdom of Numidia, a man called Hanno lives with his wife, Arishat. The Roman army under General Justus Acacius invades, conquers the kingdom, kills Arishat and enslaves Hanno with the other survivors.
Hanno Is Sold at Ostia
The enslaved are taken to Ostia, where the Romans pit them against baboons to advertise them as potential gladiators. Hanno kills one savagely. The stable master Macrinus notices, and promises Hanno a chance to kill Acacius if he wins enough fights in Rome.
Mescal plays a part built almost entirely out of withholding. Hanno is a prisoner, then a performer, then a symbol, and the script keeps his interior life at arm’s length for most of the runtime. Mescal is watchable in the arena. He is asked to carry the film’s grief, and the film gives him less to carry than it thinks.
Washington is the reason to buy the ticket. Macrinus is a former slave who plots to overthrow the twin emperors, and Washington plays him as a man running a long con in a room full of people who believe they are running one on him. He gets the film’s best lines and its only real wit. Every scene he is in moves faster than the scenes he is not.
Pascal’s Acacius returns to Rome as a war hero. He asks the emperors for a break from war so he can stay with his wife, Lucilla, who is also the daughter of Marcus Aurelius. They refuse. Instead they want him to join their plans to conquer Persia and India respectively. Pascal plays the part as a man already tired of the machine he serves, and the performance is the film’s quietest and most effective piece of work.
Lucilla Recognizes Her Son
Senator Thraex hosts a party for the emperors, featuring a gladiatorial duel. Hanno wins, then recites a verse from Virgil’s Aeneid, revealing his Roman education and raising Macrinus’ suspicion. Acacius and Lucilla conspire with Thraex and Senator Gracchus to overthrow the emperors and restore the Republic.
Nielsen reprises Lucilla from the 2000 film, and the sequel gives her the emotional spine it gives Mescal only in bursts. Lucilla watches Lucius fight in the Colosseum without recognizing him as her son. When she does, she visits him. He rebuffs her angrily, believing she abandoned him. She tells him he is Maximus’ son and tells him to use his father’s strength to survive.
That revelation is the hinge the whole film turns on, and it lands with less force than it should. The first Gladiator built its power from a single, clean want: a man who lost everything and wanted the man responsible dead. Gladiator II gives its lead a mother, a father he never knew, a dead wife, a general to hate and an empire to save. That is a lot of motives. None of them burn.
The Rhinoceros and the Naval Battle
The set pieces are the film’s strongest argument for itself. Hanno emulates Maximus to defeat Glyceo the Destroyer and his black rhinoceros. A naval battle staged inside the Colosseum gives Scott his biggest canvas, and the film’s production design and scale are not in question anywhere in the 148 minutes.
The problem is what surrounds the spectacle. The first film understood that the arena was a stage for a political argument, and it kept that argument tight. The sequel has two emperors, two conspiracies, a Senate full of schemers and a general who wants out, and it spreads its attention across all of them. Quinn and Hechinger play Caracalla and Geta as a pair of spoiled heirs. They are fun. They are not frightening, and the film needs them to be at least one of those things.
Quinn and Hechinger get the film’s least defined material. Their emperors are the engine of every bad thing that happens in Rome, and the script never gives either of them a scene that explains why they hold the city the way they do. Compare that to Commodus in the first film, who was given a full portrait of a son who wanted love and got none. Here the twins are a mood, not a threat.
A Long Shadow From the First Gladiator
The sequel’s biggest liability is the first film, and it knows it. Derek Jacobi returns as Gracchus. Nielsen returns as Lucilla. Mescal replaces Spencer Treat Clark, who played young Lucius in 2000. The film keeps reaching back for weight it has not earned on its own.
That is not fatal. Sequels to beloved films are usually either slavish or defiant, and Gladiator II is neither. It is a competent, expensive, well-cast continuation that assumes the audience’s affection for the original will do work the screenplay does not. For long stretches, that assumption holds. Mescal has the face for this kind of movie, and Scott still knows how to shoot a man walking into a crowd that wants him dead.
But the film never finds a reason to exist beyond the first film’s shadow. The first Gladiator was a story about what a man does when the state takes everything from him. Gladiator II is a story about what a man does when the state takes everything from him, and also there is a mother, and also there is a conspiracy, and also there is a naval battle, and also there is a former slave with a plan. More is not better here. It is just more.
Washington Carries What the Script Will Not
The performances are the film’s real asset, and they are unevenly served. Washington is the standout, and the film seems to know it, giving Macrinus the plot’s most interesting position: a man who was property and now moves emperors like pieces. Pascal does more with less screen time than anyone else in the cast. Mescal is asked to be a vessel for rage and grief, and he is a good vessel, but the script keeps the lid on.
Connie Nielsen’s return is the film’s most underused gift. Lucilla is the one character who connects the two movies, and the one who pays the highest price for the politics of both. The film gives her the revelation scene and then largely steps away from her.
The action is well mounted. The politics are not. For a movie about the machinery of empire, Gladiator II has surprisingly little interest in how that machinery actually turns. It has interest in how it looks when it turns, which is a different thing, and a lesser one.
What Gladiator II Gets Wrong
Gladiator II is a good night at the movies and a lesser film than the one it follows. It has a real movie star turn from Denzel Washington, a solid one from Pedro Pascal, and a lead in Paul Mescal who is doing exactly what the script asks and not one thing more. It has scale, craft and a 148-minute runtime that mostly moves.
What it does not have is a reason. The first Gladiator was about a man who wanted one thing and paid for it. This one is about a man who wants several things, in a city full of people who want several things, and the film never decides which of them matters most. That is the difference between a movie that lingers and a movie that plays.
The published critical score sits at 6.4/10, with a Metacritic mark of 64/100. That is about right, and it reflects what is on screen: a sequel with the right cast, the right director and the wrong script.
Gladiator II: 6.4 of 10
The Numbers
- Title: Gladiator II
- Year: 2024
- Director: Ridley Scott
- Writers: David Scarpa, from a story by Scarpa and Peter Craig
- Runtime: 148 minutes
- Genres: Action, Adventure, Drama
- Tagline: “Prepare to be entertained.”
- Distributor: Paramount Pictures
- Premiere: Sydney, Australia, October 30, 2024
- Lead cast: Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Connie Nielsen, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger
- Published critical score: 6.4/10 (Metacritic 64/100)
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