Boy Movies #78

Some belated words on Gladiator II

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Alright, you FUCKING VULTURES. Here’s your Gladiator II issue.

Is anybody actually still talking about this movie

Well, I don’t care, I still have things to say about it. What’s funny about Ridley Scott’s long-threatened sequel to his universally adored (by men and others but, let’s be honest, mostly men) Oscar-winning hit Gladiator — well, a lot of things are funny about it, few of them on purpose. But in this case what’s funny is that it’s rare to see people united in distaste these days. It’s rare when that distaste is so universal that seasoned critics and the average moviegoer are spouting the same criticisms. It’s sort of beautiful, or at least it’s beautiful for me, a person who did not pay between $17-30 for my Gladiator II ticket, as I am famously a proud subscriber to the AMC A-List program, which allows me to see three movies per week. It was just another Saturday night for me, brother.

Gladiator II is bad. It’s almost so bad that you wonder how it got made. The bright shining star amid it all is Denzel Washington (friend of the newsletter, ALTRWR¹) who’s as marvelous in it as you’ve heard, to the detriment of every other actor around him. While the rest of the ensemble spend the duration of the film asleep at the wheel, Denzel puts his whole weight on the gas pedal for two and a half hours. The problem — or, I mean, not the problem, but one of the problems — is that Denzel can make anything feel real. This is the same guy who recites Shakespeare like he was born speaking like that. Here, decked out in gaudy jewelry, swanning around in billowing robes, full of so much life, he’s exceptionally watchable.

Denzel plays a man named Macrinus, an ambitious, wealthy, bisexual (despite Grandpa Ridley’s many efforts…) arms dealer who sees promise in Hanno/Lucius/Whatever You Want to Call Paul Mescal’s Character’s abilities as a gladiator and strikes up a deal with him: If he wins enough fights in the CGI Colosseum², he’ll help him on his revenge mission against Pedro Pascal, who killed Mescal’s nobody wife in the first eight seconds of the movie. I could spend this entire issue yelling my lingering questions into the void: How could Gladiator II have expected us to side against Macrinus, who was not only played by the only member of the cast daring to have any fun, but also, as a former slave, had the type of backstory that makes you say, “Yeah, okay, let him have this”? Is the moral of Gladiator II supposed to be, like, “The royal bloodline deserves to win simply by virtue of being the royal bloodline³”? Respectfully, why was Pedro Pascal even there? But what point is there in asking answerless questions? I’d rather talk about what I believe to be Gladiator II’s most glaring flaw in a (CGI) sea of glaring flaws: An embarrassingly miscast Paul Mescal.

Earlier this year, I wrote about Dev Patel’s directorial debut Monkey Man, a fun and messy pastiche of the New Jersey-based film series John Wick. I see Patel and Mescal as a very similar type of actor (Patel deserves Mescal’s career and the only reason he doesn’t have it is because he’s not white, let’s just get that Hard Truth — dir. Mike Leigh — out of the way) who, until this year, have historically sought out similar types of projects: girl movies. It makes sense, considering that they’re both girl actors. While Patel spoke extensively about how long he’s wanted to do action movies during Monkey Man’s press tour, it seemed as though Mescal was the type of actor who’d comfortably settled into his girl movie niche. He was born to play the quietly alluring sensitive type, to make an intimate one-on-one scene that much more intimate with a simple tilt of his head or a tip of his chin. That’s what films like Aftersun and All of Us Strangers are almost entirely composed of, that’s why he’s so good in them. Of course, Mescal is still a man, and no man can resist the siren call of a big budget action movie.

Gladiator II, in all of its preoccupation with being as big and epic as possible, doesn’t give Mescal much room to dig into his bag of tricks. Most of his time on screen is spent doing one of three things: being pissed off that his random wife who had negative two lines is dead (like, no offense, but diva was in the army, what did you think was going to happen to her?), engaging in brutal combat, or giving these word salad speeches about protecting Rome. Paul Mescal is not the actor you hire for that. Hollywood has had “success” turning indie darlings into action stars in the past, but to what end? (TOOOO WHAT END?) Elizabeth Olsen seems like she’d rather die than return to Marvel. The woman was made for Martha Marcy May Marlene, why are we strapping Party City wigs to her skull and forcing her to marry an android?

I don’t mean to hate on all big budget movies. I mean, I do hate a lot of them, but my feelings on Top Gun: Maverick and the Fast and Furious series have been extensively documented. I just feel that we’ve lost our way with them; Barry Jenkins is kicking off the press cycle for whatever this Mufasa shit is, Dean Fleischer Camp is directing the “live-action” (STOP CALLING IT THAT!!!!!) Lilo & Stitch, Greta Gerwig is working on some Narnia adaptation. Ridley Scott had Paul Mescal playing a Russell Crowe type. Can we all take a step back?

To Mescal’s credit, you can see him trying to form connections with his scene partners throughout Gladiator II. But Gladiator II is not a movie based on connection. He can’t sell the underbaked dead wife motivation that the first half of the story relies on, nor can he sell his character’s sudden pivot to loving his mommy (played by a thoroughly disrespected Connie Nielsen, the only actor returning from the original film). Denzel is in the stratosphere, where Mescal can’t reach him; Nielsen seems to be going through the motions, and she and Mescal never fully connect. It’s not until Alexander Karim’s Ravi, a former gladiator turned doctor, finally appears that Mescal is given the space to do what he does best: lower his voice and share a laugh and enjoy the company of another person. In the scenes Mescal and Karim share, it’s like Hanno/Lucius/What Are We Supposed To Call This Guy actually morphs into a Paul Mescal character⁴. Then he’s sent back out into the Colosseum to battle a CGI baboon and he starts looking vaguely uncomfortable again and we’re back at square one.

A glance at Mescal’s upcoming projects reminded me that he’s set to appear in a gay period piece opposite Josh O’Connor (thank you Lord above)⁵ and Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Hamnet (!). I don’t wish to discuss the rumors that he’ll be playing Paul McCartney in Paul (2027) dir. Sam Mendes — talk about miscast — but even if that does happen (she says through clenched teeth) it’ll be more of a return to form after whatever the hell happened in Gladiator II. Look, we’ve all had jobs we’re unqualified for, but most of us have mercifully not had the experience of having our failures projected on IMAX screens all over the world. If large scale flops are what it takes for our beloved indie actors to get back to their roots, so be it. Burn that money, baby!

1. “As longtime readers will remember” — is this good, do we like this?

2. Jk, the Colosseum isn’t CGI, it’s just filled with so much heinous CGI that you do eventually start to question reality.

3. Begging you to be less British, Ridley.

4. If they really wanted to let Mescal do his thing, they should’ve let those two kiss, but that’s just me and my proclivities speaking.

5. Written by Jenny Slate’s husband, no less.