GLADIATOR II

I'm well into the swords-and-sandals genre so I had a good time with this sequel. And why not? It's got a lot of spectacle and a great cast - Paul Mescal! Denzel Washington! Pedro Pascal!  Matt Lucas! 

But of course it doesn't have the power of the original: it has a less clean storyline, and though he is a fine actor Paul Mescal is no Russell Crowe.

We start off following a very similar path to the original: Hanno (Mescal) is captured by the Romans and wants revenge for the death of his wife, the target of his wrath being General Acasius (Pascal).  He is bought by Macrinus (Washington) who among other things trains slaves to be gladiators.

From this point on the story arc thankfully diverges from the original if not always in a good way. 

Spoiler alert: Hanno is really (would you believe it?) Lucius, the son from the first film of Crowe's character, Maximus, and Lucilla, sent away by his mother to protect him from assassins.  Lucius is angry about that, and to compound things further Lucilla is now married to Acasius, who is actually a decent chap who's getting fed up with all the killing he is ordered to do in Rome's name.

In this film we now have two emperors, which is OK.  Less good is that we have three protagonists, who don't always seem to be in the same film.  Acasius is an underwritten character played in a dignified and restrained way by Pascal, whereas Washington is having a whale of a time playing the villainous Macrinus who will stop at nothing to seize power from the emperors.

So you have to feel a bit sorry for Mescal, having to compete with both the memory of Crowe's performance and with Washington's star power at maximum wattage.

Whereas Crowe's motivation was a simple one of revenge here it's all diffuse.  Lucius doesn't really have that much of a beef with Acasius, since his wife died in the heat of battle, and his anger towards Lucilla comes across as just youthful immaturity.  It doesn't help that the screenplay fails to give Lucius any memorable lines or speeches, so that for example his eventual reconciliation scene with Lucilla falls rather flat. 

So it is left to Lucilla herself to provide what emotional power there is.  Connie Nielsen is as great in the role as before, and the best scene here by some distance is where as a prisoner at the Colosseum she is forced to watch her son and husband fight each other to the death. 

Unfortunately the film is unable to build on that to deliver a satisfying conclusion. 

We end up with Lucius and Macrinus fighting each other.  Clearly Lucius will win, and when he does I didn't feel much sense of triumph, maybe because Washington's charisma makes Macrinus a difficult villain to hate.

To raise the stakes in the conflict between Lucius and Macrinus we get treated (if that is the right word) to some half-baked pontificating earlier in the film about how Rome should be run - on quasi-democratic lines (as Lucius's grandfather believed) or on dictatorial lines, as Macrinus believes?

But to be honest I found it hard to care.  Maybe in the light of the recent US presidential election result the idea of democracy triumphing feels just a tad hollow?

RATING: ✓ If You've Nothing Better To Do