WELL, I WAS ENTERTAINED
Gladiator II, electric boogaloo
The necessary make-up of an action movie is not the same as a romcom or an Oscar bait drama. Success lies in how many buildings the hero jumps off of, how many cars explode, how many things go boom. I once said here on in the blog how the measure of any successful action movie, for me, rests in how the stars touch each other, and what is conveyed when they do. There is so very little touching in Gladiator II. I am wondering now if that has something to do with how I feel about it overall.
Let’s get one thing straight— this wasn’t a boring movie. I saw it on Thanksgiving day with my brother (an action lover) and my mother (a notorious “fall asleep during the movie” goer). The results? My brother gave his stamp of approval and my mother stayed awake until the credits rolled. “I want to see it because of Denzel,” she said when she invited herself a few days earlier. And Denzel was certainly something to stay awake for.
It’s almost astonishing the difference in performance between him and everyone else. Not in terms of talent— I’d argue the entire cast rose to the task, even Paul who I’ve seen mixed reviews of. But there’s a difference between acting and being. I wasn’t watching Denzel play a character (the way I felt about watching Pedro Pascal, who was given almost nothing to do here unfortunately) but I was instead watching Macrinus, as if he was plucked from history and put on film for my viewing pleasure. Every idiosyncrasy, every little twitch and gesture. The way Denzel contorts his body as he bows to Dundus, the pet monkey named consul by the unstable Emperor Caracalla, has been lodged in my brain for days. And the way he gleefully crows “too much!” after Paul Mescal’s Hanno demands the head of every solider in the Roman army? It actually needs to be studied.
If the movie suffers from anything, it suffers from not understanding that the most interesting viewpoint by far is from Denzel’s Macrinus. His journey from slave to gladiator to not just a free man, but a well connected and very wealthy free man bent on taking the empire for himself is far more compelling than a lost prince returning home. I understand the impulse to make this story about Lucius / "Hanno”. He’s a character that appeared in the original, the grandson of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (who this movie can not stop talking about by the way, it was bordering on egregious I’m not gonna lie) and therefor the natural counterpoint to the evil twin emperors who are running Rome into the ground. But the “dream of Rome” (which is never even fully explained although I’m lead to believe it has something vaguely to do with democracy) rings hollow when whispered through ornate corridors and even more so when championed loudly in the gladiator pits.
Why the fuck would slaves taken by Rome’s never ending assault give a rat’s ass about any dream Rome might have? No freedom was promised (at least, not that I can remember) and even still, why would you trust the very people that took everything from you? Why would you want anything to do with them?
Paul Mescal lacks the kind of raw magnetism that would make me believe soldiers hardened by war and loss would follow him to the front gates, let alone into a battle that seems unwinnable. I think that’s perhaps the most accurate criticism that can be levied against him. He does good work, but he doesn’t quite stand out the way you need a character like this to stand out. There’s a moment, during Hanno’s first fight in the Colosseum, where he bites deeply into the arm of one of the oddly engineered monkeys he’s been forced to fight. (And I really do need someone to explain these Hunger Games looking ass monkeys to me. This is ancient Rome, yes? Are they… meant to look like a man made Frankenstein creation? Or are we meant to believe monkeys just… looked like that… back then….? Questions that need answers!) It’s a moment that speaks to a feral sort of survival instinct, one that implies this is someone who is used to playing dirty, to using every trick at their disposal to stay alive, stay on top, win. It’s a very interesting introduction, one that I wish bore out in the rest of the story.
But Mescal’s Hanno spends the rest of the movie following a very traditional, boring path to ascension. He’s talented but moral, good-natured except towards his enemies. He spends all of two seconds grappling with the implications of seeing his mother again, with reconciling her loss and the abandonment complex he’s no doubt lived with for the last two decades to a birthright that hasn’t quite been his since he was a child.
If I had been at the helm of this story, I would have exploited the similarities between Hanno and Macrinus, perhaps played up the devil’s bargain between them. There was no twist in this movie, nothing to shock or land an emotional gut punch. I think positioning Lucius / Hanno as the hero was a mistake. It would have been vastly more interesting if his acceptance of his birthright leaned less into liberation and more into naked hunger, just another form of self-preservation. The dream of Rome isn’t democracy or freedom or whatever the fuck else Ridley Scott must have gleaned from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
The dream of Rome is Macrinus, with his hand on Caracalla’s, slitting Emperor Geta’s neck. It’s Hanno in the gladiator’s pit demanding the head of every Roman soldier on a platter and Macrinus going “well, perhaps I can give you one.” It’s the grasping, clawing, desperate desire to be safe, to save the ones you love, to be the one on top calling the shots, instead of at the bottom receiving the scraps.
The dream of Rome is an empire on which the sun never sets. Because for all his ethical philosophizing, Marcus Aurelius still died with a crown on his head.
What did y’all watch during the holiday weekend? I want to hear your takes!
xx,
april