Gladiator II
Gladiator II
Years after witnessing the death of the revered hero Maximus at the hands of his uncle, Lucius is forced to enter the Colosseum after his home is conquered by the tyrannical Emperors who now lead Rome with an iron fist. With rage in his heart and the future of the Empire at stake, Lucius must look to his past to find strength and honor to return the glory of Rome to its people.
Varun reviewedDecember 5, 2024
This movie is grand but shallow at the same time. I watched this in IMAX and the scope of the set pieces are absolutely amazing. The lighting is also handled really well. And the fight scenes go hard, it’s shot with clarity and the sound design makes it perfectly impactful. On the one hand the powerfully emotive acting does affect the gravitas of various scenes, but the character writing and story is weak and hence it fails to pull any of your heart strings. It felt more like a nice looking entertaining flick to pass the time but not much complexity to care enough about the story. The emperors this time around are two caricaturish lame villains with no backstory and zero bite. Paul Mescal is fantastic, never seen him embody such a ferocious masculine personality. I wish we could see at least some camaraderie between him and his teammates but there’s none. At least his conversations with Ravi was a nice touch. Denzel is also masterful as usual, using his cunning wiles to ascend the ladder, but in the end his plans also get a bit comical, which is inevitable when dealing with empty character writing for the emperors. God they really underutilised the legacy characters, Grachhus is barely in the movie while Lucilla isn’t up to a whole lot of scheming here and is mostly relegated to being a grieving mother. I enjoyed seeing Pedro Pascal but also it seemed too similar to Maximus’s character so it felt like a repeat, I guess I noticed it more since I watched the first movie 2 days before this sequel. Spoiler Ahead. I also feel the Lucius reveal was kind of meh, didn’t really enhance the story for me that much and it seemed forced, the writers just chalk it up to fate that he ends up in Rome as a gladiator. I did learn something new though, that kids with blonde hair can actually turn into adults with dark brown hair. Despite tons of flaws the movie was entertaining enough and is worth checking out for the epic visuals and action scenes.