Maximus: Your son is safe.

Ron Howard: He was not.

After all of the bloodshed, Gladiator ends with a feeling of peace and hope for the future. Gladiator II renders those feelings entirely useless by negating all of the impact of Maximus' actions. Why? So it can repeat its predecessor's story so closely that you can almost call it a remake.

There are some fun and intense action sequences (the one with the monkeys was my favorite), but there are also battles that are poorly edited and awkward to watch. Some of the CGI is good, while others look really rough (the sharks). ADR is abused to the point of making many of the dialogue-heavy scenes distracting. Paul Mescal lacks any of the command that Russell Crowe brought to Maximus, and he makes little to no impact here. Pedro Pascal is good, but severely underused, and Connie Nielsen is shockingly bad here. The scenery-chewing emperors are fun, but like Pascal, they are underused. But the biggest issue I had with this film is the writing. Gladiator was able to communicate its themes and political commentary in a natural way that made sense for its world and treated us like adults. Gladiator II's writing feels like its afraid of getting canceled by TikTok, so it needs to hammer us over the head with its political opinions to ensure that nobody misunderstands it. We don't need Paul Mescal to say that slavery and Rome are bad every five seconds to make sure we know that the film isn't endorsing the things its depicting. We should be smart enough to know that. It makes no sense for someone like Lucius to be as mouthy as he was, and he should have been (at minimum) beaten for his disrespect to his master. That's the world that the film is depicting. It's not 2024 America. I can't get immersed in a film's world if it's too afraid to portray its culture because some people might get offended by it. Show, don't tell.

The major positive I have for this film is Denzel Washington's performance as Macrinus. He commands the screen every time he appears, and watching him Littlefinger his way into more political power was far more entertaining than anything happening in the colosseum. I wish the film was about him, rather than Maximus 2.0. This is not a horrible film, but it's an unnecessary one.