I WAS NOT ENTERTAINED! — Gladiator II

William J Hammon
13 min readDec 24, 2024

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We come to it at last. After several delays, it’s finally time to tackle the disgustingly cynical double feature that studios and influencers tried to dub “Glicked” as a manufactured means to recreate the critical and box office magic that was last summer’s “Barbenheimer” battle, but I have taken to calling “GladiWicketor” because a marketing campaign this stupid deserves an even dumber portmanteau as a giant middle finger to the money men who tried to shove an inferior product down our throats without ever once considering that the previous craze a) happened organically, and b) centered on much better films that were worthy of the moment.

It’s been more than a month since Gladiator II and Wicked Part One were released, a carefully orchestrated process designed to bludgeon audiences into submission with a massive oversaturation of advertising, coupled with highly curated advance screenings where only friendly press and established fans were allowed to voice an opinion. This was all planned as part of the strategy to artificially inflate domestic gross as well as make up a façade for Awards Season prestige, whether it was deserved or not, by front-loading those positive reviews and embargoing anything negative, and buying ad space on Rotten Tomatoes as a way to “encourage” a quick “Certified Fresh” stamp that they could use in commercials and teasers.

In the case of Gladiator II, it paid off in that last respect only. While by no means embarrassing, the box office take hasn’t been nearly as successful as its green-skinned counterpart, just barely cracking the top 15 for the year while Wicked is currently third. It also doesn’t have nearly the Oscar profile that the other film has, as it’s only on a couple of shortlists in technical categories and there’s a chance Denzel Washington will get nominated for Supporting Actor, mostly because he steals a ton of scenes and is the only one to perform in a way that acknowledges the sheer absurdity and inanity of what’s happening on-screen. But hey, it got the “Certified Fresh” designation, so it must be great, right? Wrong. If anything, getting that title just shows how manipulative the entire process was, as Rotten Tomatoes’ own criteria were violated to get it. The website states that a film must have a rating of 75% to be eligible, with at least five reviews from “Top Critics” and a minimum of 80 reviews overall. It used to also include the word “sustained” when referring to the score, but no longer, and that’s because of this modern tactic. By essentially closing off the screening process and literally funding the site, Paramount was able to ensure it got to that fabled 75% right before the film was released to the general public, and with money in their pockets, RT was only too happy to oblige by handing out its laurel. Of course, once the rest of us got to see it, the score instantly fell below that threshold, going as low as 68% and currently hovering around 70%, well short of what is required.

A big part of this disappointment is because the film we eventually got was not the one we were sold for months on end. What we were promised was a high-octane action and dramatic spectacle, an ostentatious but respectful follow-up to a Best Picture winner more than 20+ years after its initial release. What we got instead was a legacy sequel that spends most of its time visually fellating its cinematic predecessor, effects that would have been humiliatingly bad back in 2000, and a bunch of nonsensical story points and characters that only succeed on camp value. We were told it was one of the best movies of the year, but we got one of most asinine. This is why I’ve taken so long to review it, along with Wicked (coming tomorrow). Even if I didn’t have a backlog that I’ve been clearing out for weeks, I am not in the business of rewarding these disgusting corporate moves that serve only to browbeat audiences into submission rather than making actual quality art. After the deluge that was designed to insult and dismiss anyone capable of critical thought, I decided that both flicks would suffer a two-week penalty. I was not going to gift them my money and eyeballs on the opening weekend, because that would be a tacit endorsement, no matter how I felt about the product. So I sat on them for a fortnight, let other films take priority, and now, right as everyone is settling in with family for real quality time, I’m willing to give them the attention they crave, when it’s least likely that anyone will care. That’s your punishment. Don’t fuck with me.

So, to the actual movie. It sucks. It just plain sucks. I’m not a fan of legacy sequels in general, mostly because they do very little to justify their existence. Normally I wouldn’t ask a piece of art to give me a reason for it to even be, but that’s exactly my point. This is not art. This, like so many others before it, is the product of studios deciding that something was popular and successful sometime in the past, and rather than come up with something new, they instead throw money at an attempt to recreate the same experience, and it very rarely works. You can see the executive notes in every scene. This guy should repeat a line from the last movie, we should have this person die in the same manner as a character did before, let’s put some prop in the background that’s a reference to the old movie. It’s all so transparent that it might as well be another reboot of The Invisible Man. It’s one thing to revisit an established cinematic world, but that doesn’t mean you get to recycle all the same ideas and plot points.

This flick has no such scruples. After opening text that sets the timeframe (16 years after the death of Marcus Aurelius, who retroactively killed himself after being pretentiously name-dropped 20 times in Megalopolis) and tells us that the current co-emperors, Geta and Caracalla (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger, presented as twins even though the real ones weren’t, just the first of a parade of historical inaccuracies that would make Braveheart blush) are assholes, we cut to literal archive footage and recreations of scenes from the first movie, director Ridley Scott telling us all upfront that the long-dead Maximus is more important than anything else in the picture. We then meet “Hanno” (Paul Mescal), a now-adult Lucius Aurelius, son of Maximus and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), who was secreted out of Rome after Maximus died. They treat the reveal that he’s actually Lucius like it’s some sort of surprise, but even without the trailers firmly establishing that fact, you’d have to have some sort of severe head trauma to not connect the dots. Anyway, he’s a soldier of Numidia, and lives a happy pastoral life with his pre-corpse… I mean “TOTALLY not marked for death, whatever do you mean” wife Arishat (Yuval Gonen). That idyllic existence is cut short when Numidia is attacked by Rome, led by General Acacius (Pedro Pascal, one of the few high points in this mess). The city falls, Arishat is killed (QUELLE SURPRISE!), and “Hanno” is taken to Rome as a slave to fight in the gladiator arena, because the odds of this happening are completely within the realm of the universe.

At his first fight, which pits him and the Numidian survivors against a herd of rabid CGI baboons that are so terrible looking that the effects house that made them should be permanently shuttered, Hanno’s leadership and “hunger” impresses the diabolical Macrinus (Washington), a slave owner who keeps a stable of gladiators, using them to gain power and influence in the Roman government. Think of him as the Iago to Geta and Caracalla’s dyad insane Othellos. When it comes to Hanno, Macrinus sees him as an instrument of convenience, as his lust for revenge against Acacius provides him an opening to pit the general — now married to Lucilla — against the two emperors.

Washington is, at times, a lot of fun, because as I mentioned, you can tell that he’s just kind of above it all. He’s the only member of the ensemble who doesn’t bother to affect a silly accent, instead speaking in his normal American voice. He chews scenery like he’s about to visit a vomitorium afterward. Some scenes he plays like Keith Frazier in Inside Man and others he goes full Alonzo Harris from Training Day. Nearly every moment he’s on screen, it’s like he’s telling the audience, “This is a whole bunch of bullshit, so I’m just gonna have fun with it.” It’s mostly a welcome respite from the faux grandiose idiocy of the rest of the film, but even then it feels like he’s winking to the viewers just a bit too often.

And while Macrinus is a deliciously sleezy antagonist, his presence illustrates two of the biggest problems with the overall product. The first is that, in a film called Gladiator, which is ostensibly about GLADIATORS, the title character is essentially a bit player in his own story. Much more time is focused on Macrinus and his Machiavellian machinations than any actual redemptive arc or journey for Hanno/Lucius. He fights in the Colosseum, sure, but those are few and far between. He’s but the least sacrificial pawn on the board rather than the stalwart commander that Russell Crowe played last time out. Hell, the movie has such reverence for Maximus that there’s a solid five minutes (or more) of flashbacks/replays of previous scenes and a literal SHRINE to Maximus in the gladiator barracks. Your lead might as well be a background actor for all the actual story heft he gets. The only moments of any consequence for him are the opening where we telegraph his wife’s death so hard that Samuel Morse briefly resurrected (she takes out one Roman soldier with a bow and that somehow prompts Acacius to single her out as a target for his entire army to kill) and a tacked-on “You’re not my REAL mom!” tirade at Lucilla to pad the runtime halfway through. We literally have no reason to care what happens to him, as the real story unfolds completely away from him and we know he has enough plot armor to make it to the end, so none of the action set pieces has any weight.

The second is that the plot is so confused and convoluted that, in creating this villain in Macrinus (a real Roman praetorian who was nothing like the version portrayed), Scott may have unintentionally undermined his own premise for both movies. As is revealed, but can easily be guessed so I don’t count it as a spoiler, Macrinus — in this film anyway — was himself a former slave. He fought in the arena, gained his freedom, and amassed wealth and positioned himself to take his own form of revenge against those who subjugated him. But he’s also the bad guy, and most of what he does is condemned by the other characters as a betrayal of his rightful societal role. So… the white slaves are wronged and deserve their vengeance, but not the black one… who also happens to be the only major character of color? Really? The ones who were born into privilege and eventually enslaved/killed should be restored to power but the one who was conquered deserved it? Did you seriously just posit that as the moral of this story? The lily white folks had a right to a higher place in society but the black guy didn’t. Please tell me again why this deserves money and accolades.

So what about the actual fights? I mean, once you get past the cheesy dialogue, bad voices, and extended screen time for Geta’s pet monkey, this is the main reason anyone would be interested in this film, right? Well, let’s just say I’ve seen episodes of American Gladiators that were more compelling and well-choreographed. The CGI is just awful, so much so that a side glance at a tiger in a cage as a callback to the first movie is the most convincing effect of the entire affair. I remember during one scene that the cheap-looking armored rhinos from Black Panther were easier on the eyes, and then we literally had a fight with a guy riding a cheap-looking armored rhino. The camera and editing are all over the place, almost as if Scott told his crew to watch every jump-cut-a-thon Marvel action sequence while on LSD before they got to work. There’s no real sense of geography or scale, which is really bad when you consider this is an enclosed space with known dimensions. The coloring and lighting are completely inconsistent, making you yearn for the negative filming of the arena scene in Dune: Part Two.

And then there’s the naval battle. Oh my god this was so stupid on so many levels. Never mind the fact that the fight they’re reenacting is called a Trojan conflict when Troy wasn’t involved, and that it’s in praise of Poseidon, a Greek god rather than his Roman counterpart Neptune. Those dumb touches could almost be forgiven were it not for the literal flood of figurative bullshit that unfolds in this sequence. The only remotely accurate thing about it is the fact that there were pipes and other conveyances that could allow the floor of the Colosseum to be covered in water. That’s it. But from that, Scott somehow extrapolated that we could somehow flood the place enough that two full-size ships with rower galleys could have room to navigate and be buoyant with crews of dozens of gladiators, that said gladiators could make their way onto the ships from ground level despite showing only a small spattering of water on the ground, and that the water could contain man-eating sharks to devour anyone who conveniently fell overboard.

ARE! YOU! SHITTING ME!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

I mean, sharks, fucking SHARKS, in the Colosseum? Just think about the infrastructure required to pull this off. First, you have to have an aqueduct system that could supply the water. This has been studied, and it was theoretically possible, and may have even happened once or twice as a form of pageantry. To fill the Colosseum to a depth of 1.5 meters would require over 5,000 cubic meters of water. However, that’s just a depth that would allow a fallen soldier to stand up without drowning. In order to accommodate the size and maneuverability of sharks, it would need to be much deeper. So deep, in fact, that the flooding would have to rise up to fill most of the amphitheater. Seeing as how gladiators are later able to climb up from the floor into the stands as a form of uprising, it’s almost impossible that the water level would ever reach the needed amount, and even if it could it would take hours, if not days, to fill. It would also have to be salt water so that the sharks could actually swim in it without dying, and the aqueducts were designed for fresh, potable water and sewage transportation, so the entire system would have to be rerouted. And then, just a small trifle, you’d have to have a team of fishermen who could go into the Mediterranean, capture said sharks unharmed, and somehow transport them from the port of Ostia to the city, a distance of some 30 kilometers, all while keeping them submerged and alive, and then have some place to store them until the battle. You have to do all of this, just to have the silly visual of a CGI shark chomping on some random fool when he goes into the water, and somehow the massive amount of blood that comes from the prey doesn’t cause a feeding frenzy.

I’m sorry. I’m out! I’m done! I’m all for some corny camp, but this was a bridge too far. At that point I threw up my arms and just gave up. There was no saving this garbage once we got to freaking sharks in the freaking Colosseum. You might as well have just gone full Dr. Evil and attached frickin’ laserbeams to their heads. It couldn’t possibly have been any more stupid than what we got. From that point on, nothing matters. There are no stakes. This is all pointless spectacle with nothing to say, and every remaining second is a waste of my precious time.

And the thing is, I could have gone along with it, had the movie even once tried to live up to its own billing. There are some good moments. I liked that Acacius wasn’t a one-note evil guy like Joaquin Phoenix was last time out. Lucius actually had to reconsider his bloodlust once he got more information about who his rival really was. It could have been a great bit of development and growth for two of the main leads, but of course any nuance was quickly snuffed out in favor of what Scott thinks is a twist before we get to more over-the-top palace intrigue and CGI blood spatter to justify the R rating.

If this is what was sold to us, I could have gotten behind it. But instead of just letting the actual film be what it was, we were lied to for months, constantly fed a prestige narrative that never existed. If we were told that this was just goofy action and hammy acting, that could have been perfectly fine and entertaining, but the powers that be cared far more about nostalgia bating and duping the audience with false advertising that they then tried to manifest into a For Your Consideration profile once our collective senses were too dull to resist. It may have worked on some, but not on me. There are some things I enjoyed here, but in the end, all I’m going to remember is that I was promised Spartacus and instead got Deep Blue Sea.

Grade: C

Join the conversation in the comments below! What film should I review next? What’s been the biggest disparity that you’ve seen this year between what was advertised and what the movie actually was? How do the fighting baboons still have more personality than “live action” Rafiki? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!

Originally published at http://actuallypaid.com on December 24, 2024.

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William J Hammon
William J Hammon

Written by William J Hammon

All content is from the blog, “I Actually Paid to See This,” available at actuallypaid.com

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