Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Gladiator II.
Does it qualify as a spoiler to report that Gladiator II ends with the flash and clang of steel? Of course not. Director Ridley Scott, like any emperor worth his weight in golden breastplates, knows that the crowd wants blood. And at the end of the belated sequel to his own Y2K sword-and-sandals phenomenon, he obliges with a climactic mano a mano between good and bad, respectively represented by Lucius (Paul Mescal), the bastard son of the original film’s hero, and the scheming Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a former slave turned power broker.
By the calculus of marquee appeal, this final face-off makes sense: What could be more rousing, in theory, than Mescal versus Denzel — than pitting a rising star against one of Hollywood’s most bankable veterans? But in execution, there’s something curiously anticlimactic about the moment when Lucius and Macrinus conclusively cross blades, each flanked by an army. Their fight is satisfying neither as spectacle nor dramatic payoff. It just kind of … happens, and then the movie ends, though not before unwisely reminding viewers of how its predecessor came together in its closing minutes.
Few would accuse the original Gladiator of anticlimax. That movie had a simpler and much more irresistible structure — a kind of heightened sports-movie arc that followed Russell Crowe’s single-mindedly vengeful general turned slave Maximus as he rose to prominence in the Colosseum, rising through the ranks like a boxer chasing the heavyweight title. Every fight increased his sway as a symbol of populist dissent in Rome, while bringing him closer to his destiny to face Joaquin Phoenix’s treacherous, conniving Commodus in the arena. By the climax, the viewer was as starved for catharsis as Maximus himself. The whole movie had inexorably built to his knock-down, drag-out tussle against the man who killed his family.
Gladiator II gives Mescal’s Lucius, estranged from Rome and his mother, a similar motivation. He’s also the “husband to a murdered wife,” determined to claim revenge against the Roman general, Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), who led the army against his adopted people and claimed the life of his soldier spouse. Macrinus, who purchases Lucius after he’s conscripted into gladiatorial bondage in the aftermath of defeat, promises to help his new slave achieve vengeance if he keeps winning in the arena. For a while, Gladiator II seems poised to replicate the trajectory of the first film, but with the intriguing wrinkle that the target of our hero’s fury is plenty noble himself. Pascal’s character turns out to be a decent man plotting to unseat the cruel, ineffectual emperors, complicating our sympathies in a potentially interesting way. He’s also the loving husband of Lucius’s mother, Lucilla (a returning Connie Nielsen). Like her, the audience might find its allegiances divided. Call it the Fugitive effect.
But the script by David Scarpa oddly resolves this promising conflict well before the end credits. Lucius and Marcus do square off in the Colosseum, but their fight is brief, and it ends with the two realizing that they’re essentially on the same side, moments before the emperors do what Lucius won’t and condemn Marcus to a bloody, pitiless death. Are these two giggling, sadistic despots — a double dose of Commodus, by the more-is-more arithmetic of sequels — the real villains of Gladiator II? No, the film reserves that title for Washington’s Machiavellian Macrinus, who wants to destroy Rome from within, and who ends up leading the Roman army against a mutinous cavalry assembled by the executed Marcus and eventually rallied by Lucius.
All of this is much more convoluted than the way Gladiator steadily drew Maximus and Commodus together, their final battle taking on the inevitability of fate. It’s not just that Macrinus, for all of Washington’s wicked scenery chewing (the sense that he’s actually having fun, unlike any of his co-stars), isn’t as memorable or hissable an adversary as Commodus. The real problem is that his relationship with Lucius never evolves beyond an uneasy alliance of convenience, and so when they find themselves on opposite sides of the battlefield, their duel lacks anything resembling a personal stake. In the end, we’re just watching two political positions duke it out: our hero’s suddenly idealistic belief in the principles of Rome versus the villain’s cynical embrace of anarchy. To put it mildly, that’s not nearly as exciting as Commodus reaping what he sowed.
There’s little sense, as in Gladiator, that the movie has been building to this matchup all along. It doesn’t help that the fight itself passes in a hasty, indifferently choreographed blur. It’s over as soon as it begins, Macrinus sinking into shallow water just in time for Lucius to deliver a supposedly inspirational speech on the importance of the republic without a single line as stirring as Maximus’s simple, parting, “There was a dream that was Rome, it shall be realized.” Mescal is a fine, sensitive actor, but he’s out of his depth trying to fill Crowe’s shoes. It’s difficult to buy him as either a commanding military leader or a mythic action hero, a force of rage personified.
Mostly, these final minutes feel like a microcosm for the whole underwhelming film. They underscore how much Gladiator II fails to replicate the power of Gladiator, even as it sweatily bombards us with new attractions — sharks! baboons! warships! — like a Vegas fight promoter leaning way too hard on his undercard. Of course, the movie knows very well that it’s operating in the shadow of its iconic predecessor; like a lot of so-called legacy sequels, it turns that subtext into text, in this case via the story of a son trying to live up to the memory of his famous father. But no comparison between the endings of these two movies would do the new one any favors.
It’s in its final scene that Gladiator II really betrays the insecurity of its design, as Lucius makes like his dad once did and scoops up a handful of dirt — a visual callback that Scott chases with actual footage from the ending of Gladiator, set to the same elegiac Hans Zimmer ballad, “Now We Are Free,” that he cued up at the end of his earlier film. It’s truly a Hail Mary: a late, blatant attempt to trigger our nostalgic emotions. But the grandeur of the original’s ending has slipped away, like sand between fingers.
