“This is war! Real war!” And real fucking cinema too!

11/23, IMAX at AMC’s Burbank 16!

Gladiator was a fucking amazing movie. In fact it was so amazing for everyone who saw it that talks of a sequel began only a year after it released. What would follow that however were to be over twenty years of development, including a script by Bad Seeds’ Nick Cave that included fucking time travel. But you can’t keep a good sequel down, and eventually Scott finally locked in a script by David Scarpa (Napoleon, All the Money in the World) that would eventually lead to GladIIator.

Now, having got out, I’m happy to say that GladIIator is a sequel that is in every practical way worthy of being a sequel to the original.

What it understandably lacks in its emotional punch it more than makes up with both its ensemble and its spectacle. Pedro Pascal (The Wild Robot, HBO’s The Last of Us) & Paul Mescal (Aftersun, All of Us Strangers) both act their asses off and shine in their own different ways. Mescal tiptoes the line between vulnerability in his tender moments and rage in the many Colosseum battles he participates in. Pascal meanwhile acts strong as a general who no longer wishes to bathe in his bloodshed, and he shines at it in his more emotional moments. Meanwhile, both Joseph Quinn (Netflix’s Stranger Things, A Quiet Place Day One) and Fred Hechinger (HBO’s The White Lotus, Eighth Grade) both go absolutely batshit while bouncing off each other in their respective roles as co-dependent twin emperors/brothers Gata and Caracalla.

The real showstopper here though, unsurprisingly, is Denzel motherfucking Washington (Man on Fire, The Equalizer Trilogy). And here, he is most especially a show-stopper in every scene he’s in, even with Mescal. He steals the show as if this was his film, owning every set piece that he smugs, slashes and even kisses his way through the 148-minute runtime. He even embraces the whole melodrama tone of the film, leading to what could easily be some of the most hilarious (complimentary) line deliveries in the film.

If you’ve come looking for only a spectacle however, look no further. GladIIator has a shitton of things you likely have never seen in any film before, let alone a big budget sequel by a major studio. Only in a film like GladIIator will you see a monkey dressed up in a little toga. Only in a film like GladIIator will you see Mescal wrestling baboons that look like they were spawned straight from Hell (also complimentary). Only in a film like GladIIator will you see ships battling in a water-filled Colosseum complete with sharks. And ONLY in a film like GladIIator will you see a dude get impaled by an armored rhino.

Needless to say, I’ve been entertained thoroughly. This deserves to be seen on nothing more than the biggest IMAX screen you can find. Bring on GladIIIator plus the extended cuts for both this and the third film, Sir Ridley. I think they would fix me.

10/10. The fact that I’ve already preordered the steelbook before the film even came out says a lot.