The Empire strikes back: "Gladiator II"

Unlike the 94-year-old Clint Eastwood, the 86-year-old Sir Ridley Scott seems to have no trouble getting his films into cinemas, promoted and seen. As much businessman as creative, Scott clearly speaks modern boardroom lingo fluently; moreover, and this may best explain his popularity among today's studio executives, he's demonstrated no qualms whatsoever about regarding his own back catalogue as endlessly recyclable IP, as borne out by recent developments in the Alien and Blade Runner franchises, and now by Gladiator II, or GladIIator, as the onscreen title rather awkwardly has it. A bellicose film for bellicose times, the sequel could as easily trade under the title Son of Gladiator: it opens with a hand sifting grain rather than stalks in a cornfield, centralises lineage in its narrative, and continually returns to spectacle that shares its visual DNA with that of the 2000 original. Yet unlike the Alien and Blade Runner follow-ups and footnotes, which often laboured overtime to arrive at novel conceptual twists, Gladiator II is relatively straightforward blockbuster fare, determining to replicate the character arcs and thunderous strengths of its massively successful predecessor; scenes you recall from the first movie land in much the same place as you remember them landing almost a quarter of a century ago. One notable piece of team news: for the no longer battle-hardened Russell Crowe, we instead have rapidly promoted Covid holdover Paul Mescal upfront in the role of Lucius, a loving husband who sees his archer wife offed by a Roman arrow in the opening naval set-to. Captured and sold into slavery, Lucius must thereafter channel the rage and nobility of those of us watching on from the cheap seats, ourselves obliged to spend our waking hours fighting for our lives within a society and a system that shows scant mercy.

Much as even a buffed-and-bearded Mescal doesn't quite map onto the contours of Crowe in his starmaking role, GladIIator can feel callow in comparison with Gladiator. That latter was produced at a time when it was still possible for a director to cast grizzled veterans of mid-20th century stage and screen (Oliver Reed, David Hemmings, Richard Harris) who seemed to have internalised decades of big, brawny character acting. As with modern Hollywood, this Rome is being run by kids (Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger), although Scott's saving grace remains his fondness for seasoned performers, here used to bulk out the prevailing palace intrigue. In a role that overlaps with both the Reed and Joaquin Phoenix characters from the original, Denzel Washington is all brisk, chuckling, notionally bisexual authority, working up an unlikely but fun double-act with Tim McInnerny as a weak-willed senator. Scott gets this movie into the arena earlier - he knows full well what he's selling - but the brutal hand-to-hand combat of the Crowe era has been trumped by more pixellated forms of activity: men vs. feral monkeys, men vs. rhinos, men vs. sharks, the sort of setpieces that might have featured in a direct-to-DVD Gladiator knock-off from The Asylum in 2001. If you're anything like me, you may begin to wonder how much of this script (by David Scarpa) is formed of ideas rejected first time around on the grounds of being more silly than mythic. It's watchable enough - unlike Scott's ill-judged Napoleon, there's never a dull moment - and delivers the scale and spectacle one might expect from a Gladiator movie, but increasingly it begins to feel like an echo of the original. 24 years on, we're even further away from what these movies once meant to Hollywood, travelling in the direction of pastiche.

Gladiator II is now showing in cinemas nationwide.