Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Gladiator II. Does it qualify as a spoiler to report that Gladiator II ends with the flash and clang of steel? Of course not. Director Ridley Scott , like any emperor worth his weight in golden breastplates, knows that the crowd wants blood.
And at the end of the belated sequel to his own Y2K sword-and-sandals phenomenon, he obliges with a climactic mano a mano between good and bad, respectively represented by Lucius (Paul Mescal), the bastard son of the original film’s hero, and the scheming Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a former slave turned power broker. By the calculus of marquee appeal, this final face-off makes sense: What could be more rousing, in theory, than Mescal versus Denzel — than pitting a rising star against one of Hollywood’s most bankable veterans? But in execution, there’s something curiously anticlimactic about the moment when Lucius and Macrinus conclusively cross blades, each flanked by an army. Their fight is satisfying neither as spectacle nor dramatic payoff.
It just kind of ...
happens , and then the movie ends, though not before unwisely reminding viewers of how its predecessor came together in its closing minutes. Few would accuse the original Gladiator of anticlimax. That movie had a simpler and much more irresistible structure — a kind of heightened sports-movie arc that followed Russell Crowe’s single-mindedly vengeful general turned slave Maximus as he rose to prominence in the Colosseum, ri.
