What Prometheus, Covenant, and now Gladiator II have taught me (along with his bloated output of so-so true crime and biopic films of the last decade) is that Ridley Scott is finished as a top director – and has been for some time.
We all know that the Alien prequels are a bit rubbish – that’s hardly up for debate. Despite spectacular visuals, they both get bogged down in philosophy, eugenics of the creature, and the stupidity of the characters. It’s a far cry from the lean, mean haunted-house-in-space of the first film – though, at least, Scott can’t be accused of resting on his laurels by going back to the same well. That is, until Gladiator II.
Gladiator is a classic: a big, dumb, beautiful epic that belongs in the 50s rather than 2000. The performances are iconic and career-defining, the action and story and character are all in sync with one another, and, of course, it’s got some of the best lines in all of cinema. A sequel has been in the works since Gladiator won a bunch of Oscars (not Ridley, though – Steven Soderbergh won for Traffic) – based around stuff about Maximus either returning from the afterlife, or becoming a warrior for death. Nonsense, basically, and it’s a good thing that we didn’t end up with that tripe.
What we did get, 24 years later, is what I can only describe as a straight-to-DVD idea that managed to garner a few hundred million dollars in budget. Gladiator II is awful in nearly every way it possibly could be – the action scenes are too short, so anti-climactic that even flooding the Colosseum felt like an afterthought. The characters are paper-thin and the actors don’t seem to be trying their hardest to bring them to life. Paul Mescal as Lucius is terrible in every way, which is both Mescal (who never serves up a convincing moment) and Scott’s fault- the character is a complete cipher, an insert-Gladiator-lead here. He’s not alone, as fellow internet boyfriend Pedro Pascal couldn’t look more bored if he tried, and Connie Neilson dropping any weight she had as a legacy character by being the messenger of doom. At least Denzel Washington decided to try, with a ridiculous, overblown, and remarkably entertaining performance that is the only life this film has.
Gladiator II feels like the nadir of Scott’s credibility as a respectable director; even his worst films are beautiful to look at, but he is a long way from his glory days. Lucius and co feel like the result of a spreadsheet approach: take three internet boyfriends (Joseph Quinn rounding things out), as many references to the first film as you can cram in instead if a script, and let the director shoot as quickly as possible so he can get on to that Bee Gees biopic that might make some real money.
The last truly great Ridley Scott Film was The Martian, a movie that is the answer to all of the negative questions about Scott. Why is that better than the Alien prequels, or Gladiator sequels, or bloody Napoleon? The script by Drew Goddard. It’s simple – give Scott a character driven script in which the action is in service of the characters and he can still play with the big boys. But Gladiator II is proof that Scott’s one-time blockbuster mastery is on the outs – unless he can find scripts to match his once-magnificent vision.
If you enjoyed this and want to see more stuff like it, please consider supporting us on Ko-Fi.
By Kevin Boyle
No But Listen 