B ack in June, Russell Crowe told a US podcast that he felt “slightly uncomfortable” with the idea of a sequel to Gladiator in which he doesn’t feature. “A couple of things that I’ve heard, I’m like, ‘No, no, no, that’s not in the moral journey of that particular character,’” he explained. You can understand the apprehension.
Just think of how imperious Crowe was in Ridley Scott’s swords-and-sandals classic, all grizzled, gravel-voiced machismo as the soldier who becomes a slave who becomes the saviour of Rome. It was a triumphant performance in a film that had everything. Betrayal! Beheadings! The Colosseum! A monologue I can definitely not recite word for word! And of course the whole thing was carried off with such chutzpah that you could let slide some of its more portentous posturing.
My word were we entertained. If only one could say the same for the sequel. For a film that took what seems like centuries to get made, Scott’s Gladiator II feels weirdly rushed, a gallimaufry of half-baked ideas and lazy throwbacks to the Crowe original from 2000.
And yet critics, by and large, have loved it . The Guardian called it “gobsmacking” . “Relentlessly entertaining,” wrote The Daily Telegraph , while The Independent ’s Clarisse Loughrey said: “ Gladiator II shows us how to make cinema with a capital C.
” Far be it from me to disregard their opinions, but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed. Terribly vexed, even. For a start, David Scarpa’.