GLADIATOR AGAIN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Can I say anything positive about the Gladiator sequel? What is the title? Gladiator 2. That’s not it. Gladiators. Far too obvious. On the cover, it’s a very Roman Gladiator II. Unfathomably, Sir Ridley Scott™ harks back to ALIEN with the title lettering appearing in a vaguely animated form. So, on screen, the movie is GLADIIATOR.
   But really, the movie is Gladiator Again. A film you’ve already seen as Gladiator. By the numbers. Tick off the story points from a checklist based on the first movie. This time around, there are far more computer effects on display. And almost everyone in the film is miscast. Except for those who returned for the sequel.
   Connie Nielsen and Sir Derek Jacobi are cast perfectly as the same characters they played before. Jacobi was cast in Gladiator off the back of the grumpy director’s memory of the actor’s TV role as Claudius. And Jacobi was cast in Gladiator II off the back of the grumpy director’s memory of the actor’s role in Gladiator.
   It would be terribly awkward not to mention Russell Crowe. And also terribly awkward to mention Russell Crowe. He does indeed appear in this sequel, using footage from the first film in flashback. Can’t really fault the casting, there. But practically everyone else has wandered in from another film.
   Chief contender in the miscasting category is an actor who truly has wandered in from another film, and brought his own plotline with him to blur the thin story of this one. Denzel Washington is fucking great in this movie. It’s just…that he was cast off the back of the grumpy director’s memory of having worked with Denzel before.
   Every second on screen, Denzel fills the movie with crackling sparks…and a plot from somewhere else. If they’d stripped all the pesky Gladiator and Gladiator II stuff out of this film, then there’d be another film entirely. One starring Denzel Washington. And one we’d all be interested in.
   Okay. So what’s the thin plot, here? There’s a man lost in the turmoil of battle. Sad things happen. He is forced to become a gladiator. Quickly, he learns how to handle his new life in an arena out in the sticks. There, he meets Oliver Reed Denzel Washington. No one buys or sells any giraffes.
   There’s a shot at taking out the villain in the much larger arena in Rome. We do see a tiger. Villains must be overthrown. People scheme. These scheming people are, once again, Connie Nielsen and Sir Derek Jacobi.
   It’s Gladiator Again.
   Our hero is the down-on-his-luck adult who was the kid from the first film. At least that’s a valid reason for waiting over two decades to make a fucking sequel. I’ll almost give them that. It might have worked, too, if they’d cast the child actor in the adult role. But they cast, miscast, someone else.
   Spoiler. Russell Crowe’s character is very dead. Most sincerely dead. He could’ve been alive and in the sequel. We’ll talk about Nick Cave later. No, really. It was a whole thing.
   Back to the secret kid. Not that the kid was a secret. Maybe his real daddy was a secret, in the first film. Vague hints. We couldn’t have anything more than vague hints. You see, Maximus Derivative Sequelus…
   Fuck it. The whole point of Russell Crowe’s character in the original film is that he’d have his vengeance in that film and not the next. Maximus had to avenge the death of his wife and son. And for that reunion at the end of the film to have an emotional impact, out in the filtered wheat fields, his character couldn’t have a secret son after banging Connie Nielsen’s character.
   But here, as too many movie and TV scripts utter, here we are. The secret son has grown up, turned his back on the Evil that is Rome, and is now living a peaceful life in…aw, fuck, here come those pesky Romans. Our hero, Haribo, goes up against our anti-hero General Stand-In, who felt all inspired by Russell Crowe back in the day.
   I’ll see you…on the beach! That opening bombast is partly Saving Private Ryan, partly Ridley Scott advertising something – we aren’t sure what – and partly snippets taken from Frank Miller’s 300. The gladiatorial movies share the same stunning levels of historical accuracy with 300, I am happy to report. I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if a tyrannosaur turned up in that fancy arena, replacing the computerised rhino.
   Maybe look for that feisty reptilian action in the third glorious movie: Gladiators Three. An epic return to form as the two dead fuckmuppet Emperors from this movie are brought back to life by ALIEN™ technology to ride into battle aboard their steam-powered pet dinosaur Duke Daisy. It’s a musical comedy. I can hear the critics sing, singing a song of angry men. Starring the desecrated digital bones of Ian Holm…
   I’ll stop there. Just don’t get me fucking started on that fiasco.
   How often do I think about the Roman Empire? I never think about the Roman Empire. Even when I’m thinking about how often I don’t think of the Roman Empire, I’m not even thinking about the Roman Empire. I wasn’t even thinking about the Roman Empire when I watched two gladiator-themed moves directed by Ridley.
   Really should stop calling him Ridley. People will think Daisy Ridley directed Gladiator II. No, even when watching a Rome-themed movie, it appears that I never think of the Roman Empire.
   There is no homo-erotic subtext in one film or the other film. (It’s in both films.)
   Plot twist. Gladiator Haribo and General Stand-In are now at odds with each other. Oh no. One is the secret son of Russell Crowe’s character Maximus. The other secretly worship’s Russell Crowe’s character Maximus. Only in cinemas.
   The opening of this movie is full of blood, thunder, thud, blunder, bombast, bomb blasts, napalm, death, and one or two digital sequences. I counted one or two. Then lost interest in counting the rest.
   There’s a new score featuring reheated elements from the original score. Inspirational speeches abound, though they are served up late from the microwaved leftovers from the first film.
   Speaking of microwaved leftovers from a better movie, the Emperor was replaced by two of the most miscast actors in a Mediterranean Sea of miscast actors. Least said, soonest mended. I just don’t have the energy. Should have hired Statler and Waldorf – though they, too, would have been miscast.
   What we do in life echoes in the sequel. Are we not entertained? You’re damned fucking right we are not entertained. Ridley has one eye on another pointless ALIEN sequel, showing us what would happen if the alien infected a family of baboons.
   They could have spent a whole lot more money on the computerised baboons. Wouldn’t have mattered. Strangely, I found the rhino a hell of a lot easier to accept. There’s a sliding scale of acceptance in this movie…
   It runs…rhino, yes. Baboons, no. Rubber sharks…fuck off. All of the computer models for animals are miscast in this film. Even the rhino. But that hardly matters. Here, they are outshone by the miscast humans. Loads of ’em.
   Pedro Pascal, General Stand-In, is miscast as a man who is miscast in a film. Yes, even his miscasting in this movie feels a bit off, a bit extra, in the department of wrongness. In the final analysis, that’s nothing. Nothing. Compared to…
   Matt Lucas as a Roman game-show host. Yes. That bit of stunt casting. Miscasting. David Hemmings wasn’t available. Death will affect the casting process that way. Yes, we miss Oliver Reed as well.
   This farce of a gladiatorial movie almost had me nostalgic for Gor. That’s a lie. I will never have nostalgia for Gor. Not even for all of the Oliver Reed scenes in Gor. They should have called this Gladiator: the Rematch. This time it’s personal. Only in cinemas.
   Gladiator: the Rehash. Okay. I get it. If the role is also part of the title, then we’re going to see some gladiatorising at some point. Gladiator Rising might have been a far better bet as a title. Is there any director out there, way out there, more inconsistent, more fucking random, than Ridley?
   Advertising jobs saved him. Made him. He owed it all to Captain Birdseye. If you listened to Captain Birdseye, though, Ridley was an arsehole. Mucking around at the BBC, Ridley was almost in a position to design the Daleks for Doctor Who. Why didn’t he design the Daleks? Because they’d have fucking resembled him. And Ridley wouldn’t have fucking cared.
   Scrolling down the patchy Scott filmography…it’s definitely a thing. By fuck, he veers wildly from film project to film project. He’s still going as I type, so, luckily for him, GLADIIATOR won’t be his last film.
   At least no one made the GLADIATOR sequel about Russell Crowe returning from the dead as an immortal assassin hell-bent on killing Jesus. Yes, that was my response when I first heard about it. Either Nick Cave was smoking everything while writing…or he was smoking nothing.