On the subject of historical inaccuracies in his biopic Napoleon (2023), director Ridley Scott told the Times of London, “When I have issues with historians, I ask: ‘Excuse me, mate were you there? No? Well, shut the f*** up then.’” It’s the kind of thing you get to say if you’re making Gladiator (2000), a truly masterful revenge fantasy draped loosely over some half-remembered facts and figures from ancient Rome. Less so when you’re making Napoleon, a turgid and badly edited live-action Wikipedia entry shot in a color scheme I can only describe as mudscale.
Scott’s latest, Gladiator II, is somewhere in between the original Gladiator and Napoleon. It’s not so absurd that you can’t charitably suspend a little disbelief — OK, so they never put sharks in the Colosseum (that we know of), but it would have been hella metal if they did. Still, this sequel never rises near the level of greatness that makes you forgive and forget its liberties entirely. When a somber nobleman appears seated in an ancient Roman café (not a thing), reading the daily papers (also not a thing) like some Parisian dandy from the belle epoque, you start to think, Is this really worth the 30 bucks it costs in President Joe Biden’s America to watch sword fights in IMAX?
It almost is. Unlike Napoleon, the Gladiator franchise takes place firmly on an alternate timeline where all things work out for the most epic battles in the most epic of all possible sequences. The first movie followed Russell Crowe as Maximus, a general enslaved by a scheming imperial brat (Joaquin Phoenix) and forced to fight his way through the ranks of gladiatorial combat to avenge the murder of his family.
The sequel contrives to set up basically the same template under the joint reign of brothers Geta and Caracalla (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger), whose conflicted general Acacius (Pedro Pascal) subdues the African city of Numidia. The beautiful Arishat (Yuval Gonen) dies implausibly in combat while her husband, Hanno (Paul Mescal), is taken captive. Then he must … fight his way through the ranks of gladiatorial combat to avenge the murder of his family.
Once again it’s vaguely based on real people and events, but anyone who goes in expecting fidelity to the historical record is missing the point. So one understands Scott’s frustration with academics like University of Chicago Professor Shadi Bartsch, whose translation of the Aeneid was pretty decent but whose first-person commentary is regularly that of the pedantic spoilsport. Bartsch described Gladiator II as “total Hollywood bulls***,” which is of course what the audience, including those of us who have read Tacitus, paid to see. We know what we signed up for, and we don’t particularly need interruption from apple-polishers to remind us that Maximus is wearing the wrong kind of arm greaves.
Still, there’s no denying that this retread is more ham-fisted than its predecessor, its plot beats more rote and predictable. Gladiator was a worthy heir to classics such as Ben-Hur; the sequel belongs in a category that includes 2 Fast 2 Furious. Mostly it’s a vehicle for Pascal to glower defiantly at the emperors and for Mescal to take his shirt off. Not that I’m complaining. No movie can be all that bad when it features Denzel Washington, in this case as the villainous slave trader Macrinus. Washington is not simply chewing the scenery here. He is rubbing the scenery tenderly in a blend of aromatic spices, slathering it in its own juices, and wolfing it down with a honey glaze. Whatever this screenplay had to offer, Washington gave.
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So the problem isn’t so much the sharks or even the fact that Macrinus attributes to Cicero a line he seems to have gotten off of BrainyQuote. The problem is Scott doesn’t have that much juice left in the tank, and he doesn’t seem to think there’s a difference between his shallow B movie and the grandeur that was actual Rome. After he told historians to “get a life” and “shut up” about Napoleon, he added, “Like all history, it’s been reported. Napoleon dies, then, 10 years later, someone writes a book. … 400 years later there’s a lot of imagination.”
Well, sort of. This is like the ChatGPT version of a platitude many of us were taught in school, to the effect that all historians select, interpret, and sometimes even distort or omit things for reasons of personal interest or simple ignorance. But ten-cent postmodernists like to stress this fact wildly more than it will bear, until “truth” is supposed to be merely a fashionable construct. When artists such as Scott take this claptrap seriously, they go around talking as if they’ve produced a masterwork on par with Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — when really it’s just a forgettable Thanksgiving blockbuster.
Spencer Klavan is an associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books, host of the Young Heretics podcast, and author of How to Save the West.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
