Critics say Paul Mescal film is ‘gobsmacking’ and ‘loopy’

Gladiator II – Ridley Scott’s highly anticipated sequel following the 2000 epic – has been met with a mixed response from film critics.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called the movie a “thrilling spectacle” and “gobsmacking reboot”.

His four-star review also praised Paul Mescal for his performance as the illegitimate son of Russell Crowe’s Maximus, Lucius, and called him a “formidable lead”.

However, he agreed with most critics that while the film is an enjoyable watch, it doesn’t quite live up to the Oscar-winning original.

“It isn’t quite as strong as its predecessor,” wrote Robbie Collin for The Telegraph. “But it is still the year’s most relentlessly entertaining blockbuster.”

“You miss Russell Crowe, but Mescal is always watchable, with a stocky, swarthy, brooding presence,” he added in the four-star review.

The FT’s review celebrated veteran director, Ridley Scott, for his “stubborn charm”, “belligerent swagger” and “ideas that are more pulpy and loopy”.

“The best of the film is its sheer bloody-minded heft, a blockbuster fuelled by an insistence on bigger, sillier, movie-r,” Danny Leigh wrote, giving the film three stars.

But he added that he’d “be amazed if the sequel is remembered by Christmas, let alone in 24 years”.

Variety’s Owen Gleiberman said that while the sequel was a “solid piece of neoclassical popcorn” it’s “ultimately a mere shadow” of the original.

He also noted that while Mescal delivers a fine performance he has “an anger that never quite simmers to a boil” and “we now can’t help but see him as a millennial knockoff of Crowe’s glowering royal punk”.

The Independent’s four-star review also commended 86-year-old Scott, who appears to care less about habits and expectations the older he gets.

“Gladiator II is equal in scale and spectacle, and weighted with metaphor, but it’s also shot through with the kind of wry, absurdist slant that’s come to dominate Scott’s work of the last decade and a half,” wrote Clarisse Loughrey. “At times, Gladiator II is pure camp.”

The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the film delivers bigger, bolder action thanks to advances in digital technology.

There are “heavily armed gladiators riding a charging rhinoceros” and “wounded men tumbling from boats into the jaws of ravenous sharks” during the nautical battle staged in the flooded pit of the Colosseum.

David Rooney was less favourable about Mescal’s performance and called it “a tad flat at times” with his emotional range “sticking mostly to the same notes of brooding intensity and simmering rage”.

Kevin Maher at The Times also criticised Mescal and said he “disappoints in this dreary, Marvel-esque sequel”.

In his two-star review, he wrote that the film is a “scattershot effort with half-formed characters and undernourished plotlines that seem to exist only in conversation with the Russell Crowe original.

“There is no substantial story this time around, and no driving ideas in the hotchpotch screenplay.”

The Wrap’s William Bibbiani agreed and said while the film “has everything it needs in the action department, it’s the story that falls apart”.

“The whole thing hangs on contrivance and familiarity, not characters, so the fights don’t seem to matter much.”

However, Bibbiani and Maher noted that Denzel Washington is particularly good as Machiavellian former slave, Macrinus, who now profits off gladiators.

Maher said the film “only ignites when Denzel Washington’s brilliant, bisexual slave manager is on screen,” he said.

Other critics agreed and The Guardian said he “almost steals the entire picture”, while The Hollywood Reporter called his performance “lip-smacking”.

Empire’s four-star review praised other members of the cast as well – Pedro Pascal is “as charismatic as ever” and Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger as Roman Emperor twins “rival Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus from the original Gladiator in terms of crazed volatility and also have a distinct whiff of the ultimate mad emperor Caligula”.