Gladiator 2 Review: No One is Entertained

Well, folks, I finally gathered the courage (and energy) to watch Gladiator II this week, and I have to tell you, that hurt—and I don’t mean figuratively. Someone seriously needs to stop giving Ridley Scott a camera. For the sake of your time and my sanity, I’m going to keep this brief (I hope), much like Gladiator 2 should have been. Expect spoilers, obviously.

I’ll start with Paul Mescal, who plays a grown-up Lucius. Mescal is undoubtedly talented. He already proved this in Normal People, a Hulu miniseries that is grossly underrated. But in Gladiator 2, he feels more like a theater kid at a Roman costume party than the heir to Russell Crowe’s legendary Maximus. Where Crowe commanded the screen with raw intensity and gravitas, Mescal seems to be going through the motions of what he thinks a gladiator should be.

His performance, though, can be forgiven when compared to the ridiculous screenplay written by David Scarpa. The gist is: Lucius loses his wife to a random arrow, seeks revenge, changes his mind because of a brief conversation with his estranged mother, and suddenly decides his grandfather’s political aspirations are more important than avenging his beloved. What in the madness is this plot?

Speaking of mad, let’s talk about the emperor twins. In the original, Joaquin Phoenix gave us a complex, emotionally damaged Commodus whose daddy issues could fill the Colosseum. Phoenix made you understand his villainy and even, to some level, sympathize with his motivations, however misguided they were.

However, Geta and Caracalla have nothing even close to that. There’s no semblance of reason or purpose with these two. They’re simply villains because, well, they can. At the end of the movie, I could understand why Rome fell.

What’s funny is that the action sequences, which should be the saving grace of any gladiator movie, feel oddly sterile. Sure, there’s plenty of CGI, so much so that it feels like there’s a quota they were trying to fulfill. You’ve got your CGI rhino, rabid baboons, and sharks—yes, sharks in the Colosseum.

Okay, I have to go off on a tangent to get this off my chest. Sharks? In the Colosseum? In 211 AD? Have these people ever heard of GOOGLE? I ask because if they did just a simple search, they would understand just how difficult the logistics of transporting a shark in the 21st century are, let alone over 1,800 years ago.

You have to cater to temperature and salinity levels and pump oxygen into the water to keep dissolved oxygen levels high, or else the sharks die. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Are they trying to say Rome had a handle on such technology? And if someone tries to explain this away using aqueducts, please, buzz off!

My point is, none of the action in Gladiator 2 feels real or consequential. Where the original gave us visceral combat that made you feel a rush of adrenaline, this one gives us video game cutscenes.

I almost forgot, Denzel Washington was also in this film as Macrinus, an ambitious senator that sounds and acts nothing like one. He did bring his usual charisma, but goodness, did he stick out like a sore thumb. Someone must have missed the briefing that he was starring in an epic, not Training Day. One minute he’s playing kingmaker, the next he’s challenging someone half his age to a sword fight while two armies patiently wait to see who wins and what their next move will be.

Pedro Pascal seems to be the most wasted talent in the entire cast. Between playing Javier Pena in Narcos and Joel in The Last of Us, someone somewhere told Hollywood execs that “Internet Daddy” needs to star in a film for it to be successful. But even Pascal himself couldn’t turn a rubbish script into a watchable film.

Here’s the thing: the original Gladiator wasn’t perfect, but it understood something fundamental—emotional depth matters more than spectacle. When Maximus asked, “Are you not entertained?,” it was a moment of bitter defiance. When this movie asks the same question, the answer is a resounding “No, not really.”

Should you watch Gladiator 2? If you’re a die-hard fan of the original, skip it. If you’ve never seen the first one, please, I beg you, watch that instead. At least that one earned its place in the history books.