Not good trash or even hot garbage; more like recycled junk, and pretty thin gruel for auteurists as well. No volume of "God Ridley" tweets and "can he even *say* this?" interviews in big outlets are going to convince me that Diddly Squat has been consistently killing it in his twilight years; what convinces me is when he actually goes and makes a strong movie, like The Last Duel, which achieved all the things G2 is trying for -- sweep, scope, genuinely brutal violence, cogent dramaturgy and social allegory -- and felt like an earned act of authorial self-reckoning besides. The thing about The Last Duel is that it was built atop a solid, load-bearing screenplay, whereas this is just poorly and indifferently written from beginning to end, never more so than when it's trying to squeeze pathos out of recurring situations and relationships that most of the audience members around me seemed to not remember ("who's this lady" whispered a guy behind me when Connie Nielsen showed up). Look, I can accept that there are people out there who will thrill to the exploits of smooth, pale Paul Mescal as the leader of a pan-African slave rebellion, and who will feel that his character's habit of solemnly repeating 25 year old catchphrases as holy writ is compelling stuff. I just couldn't get there myself. Ditto the hype over Denzel's amusing but way-less-weird than advertised performance, which is closer to the center of the action than I'd have guessed from the trailers but doesn't explode the dull, perfunctory plodding of the plot. Too much plot, I think, and also too much Pedro Pascal, who seems like a nice guy in real life and like Ned Flanders onscreen, which is wrong for a tactical battlefield savant; the only character I wanted more of was the rabid, shaved baboon that serves, memorably and prematurely, as Mescal's toughest opponent. (The CGI rhino is a big letdown, tbh). The battle and hand to hand set pieces are boring and weightless, even compared to Napoleon (whose icy-massacre centerpiece was quite good and even frightening) and there's no sense of momentum to speak of; I'm no Gladiator super-fan but it does have an effective gauntlet-style structure whereby you really do want to see Russell Crowe get his shot at murdering fey, whiny little Joaquin Phoenix in front of thousands of people. The sequel doubles down on lazy homophobia (the bad guys are Ed Sheeran looking twin(k) emperors in the throes of syphillis) and vengeance-is-mine motivation, but then climaxes with a rousing, Sorkinian speech about putting differences aside and turning swords into ploughshares, which doesn't exactly capture the present zeitgeist.