REVIEW: Gladiator II - magnificent moviemaking in superior sequel

The fabulous thing is that Russell Crowe doesn’t hang over the new Gladiator sequel anything like as much as you might fear. Paul Mescal, stepping into his sandals, is every bit his equal and in fact his superior. It’s a blistering, astonishing performance he gives – especially given the huge weight of expectation that comes with it.

Maybe the original Gladiator has had too much time to grow too familiar, dimmed by too many rewatches, but the fact is that all the impact, all the freshness, all the thrills are with Gladiator 2, a film which really does deserve to mop up in all departments at next year’s Oscars.

In hindsight (and we watched it again last night just to check), Gladiator 1 (as it has presumably now become), is a remarkably straightforward film for all its scale and sheer epic-ness; a linear revenge thriller which doesn’t deflect from its course for a moment. What gives Gladiator 2 the marked edge is that it is genuinely complex. It twists and turns constantly and it surprises. You are never quite sure where it’s going – even though you suspect. And consequently its 148 minutes whizz by. Gladiator 2 is edge of the seat stuff at a level the first film probably never attained.

At first it seems it is going to be far too familiar. We kick off with a huge battle. And then our hero’s wife gets killed. We’ve got a seemingly cruel general, and we’ve got Denzel Washington slipping into the Oliver Reed role. But the brilliance of the film is that it then rips it all up and goes all out for real emotional complexity and ambiguity.

The cruel general, Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), turns out to a decent guy. The real villains are the superb pairing of Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), the twin emperors back in Rome, beautifully played as a pair of evil children, casually violent, lazily sinister, Caligula at the double. And they become the focus as decent men harp on about restoring the elusive Roman dream.

Washington is wonderfully Machiavellian as the slave-driver turned politician, driven by overarching ambition. The emperor’s daughter Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) returns from the first film, and suddenly the connection is made: Paul Mescal’s Lucius turns out to be Russell Crowe’s illegitimate son – a slightly clunky bit of plotting which is probably the weakest point in the film.

But the rest of it is gobsmacking – in the enormity of the set pieces, in the power of it all and in the brilliance of Mescal’s performance, commanding the screen, brooding, intense, but with humour still and compassion, a real screen hero who lives and breathes and fills the whole film with intense life and a compelling sense of peril. Undoubtedly this is the finest film of the year – not least for the fact that it is never less than visually stunning.