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bIn June, Russell Crowe told an American podcast that he felt “slightly uncomfortable” with the idea of ​​a sequel to Gladiator in which he does not appear. “A few things I’ve heard are, ‘No, no, no, that doesn’t fit into the moral journey of that particular character,'” he explained.

You can understand the fear. Just think of how imperious Crowe was in Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sandals classic, all grizzled machismo with a gravelly voice as the soldier who becomes a slave and the savior of Rome. It was a triumphant performance in a film that had everything. Deception! Beheadings! The Colosseum! A monologue that I certainly cannot recite word for word! And of course the whole thing was executed with such brutality that you could let go of some of its more ominous attitude. My word was that we enjoyed ourselves.

If only you could say the same for the sequel. For a movie that seemingly took ages to get made, Scott’s Gladiator II feels strangely rushed, a collection of half-baked ideas and lazy references to Crowe’s 2000 original. And yet critics generally love it. The Guardian called it “mind-boggling.” “Relentlessly entertaining,” wrote The Daily Telegraphwhile The independentClarisse Loughrey said: “Gladiator II show us how to make cinema with a capital C.” Far be it from me to ignore their opinions, but I couldn’t help but be disappointed. Terribly irritated even.

For starters, David Scarpa’s screenplay tramples on the earlier film’s legacy as a heavy-footed Roman legion, as Crowe feared. Take the hero, Lucius (Paul Mescal), the nephew of the original’s creepy Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) and the grandson of the idealistic Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris). Now we know that Crowe’s Maximus was a troubled man; the memory of his murdered wife and son is what sustained him. But this new film neutralizes the former general and reveals that Lucius is his illegitimate son, the result of his love affair with Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla. Maximus, you scoundrel.

The story itself is not so much a march forward as a repetition of steps. In many ways it is a remake. Just as Maximus sought revenge for his family, Lucius seeks revenge on Rome, the city that sent him into exile in North Africa as a child before killing his wife, enslaving him and forcing him to participate in a gladiator festival in the Colosseum. Sound familiar? Only this time our hero has the gift of quoting Virgil. Even the set pieces mirror those of the original: the film opens with a big battle scene and then moves the action to an amphitheater on the outskirts of Rome, before a series of confrontations takes place in the Colosseum. Of these, the most offensive is also the most historically dubious, as the arena fills with water and a hungry swarm of shonky CGI sharks join the fray, straight from the animated soup of Deep blue sea.

Of course, a sense of déjà vu doesn’t necessarily mean a bad movie. After all, Star Wars: The Force Awakens looked very similar A new hope yet it was still exciting. But here, hampered by a script that expects him to give heavy weight to lines that only sound plausible when growled by Crowe, like “Strength and Honor,” the normally brilliant Mescal is reduced to a dull cipher. His impassioned monologue near the end is painfully reminiscent of Orlando Bloom’s in Scott’s 2005 Crusader epic, Kingdom of heaven. Also consider Derek Jacobi, back as Senator Gracchus. I infused the first film with some I, Claudius-style gravitas, here he is brought back purely to remind everyone of the solemnity of Marcus Aurelius’ trust, before being unceremoniously sidelined and then discarded.

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As for the villains, I couldn’t stand Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger’s crazed co-emperors Geta and Caracalla, with their ticks and Sunday nervousness, but Denzel Washington, as a slave owner with sky-high ambitions, is wonderfully cunning and steals every scene and generally putting all actors to shame. He’s the only real winner of the film, aside from perhaps Caracalla’s monkey, which lights up the screen.

True indeed Gladiator felt epic in scope, its characters carefully formed, this sequel gallops wryly towards the finale and plays fast and loose with a script that doesn’t care about hiding glaring plot holes. During a recent speech in Los Angeles, Nielsen discussed the haste with which the film was made: “This time, setting up the movie 25 years ago now takes 20 minutes,” she said. “We couldn’t believe how quickly we were progressing.”

It shows. Scene by scene, Gladiator II just feels… undercooked. There’s no panache, no bombast, no indelible lines. It’s as if Scott lamely knocked it out and never looked back, content to rest on his laurels. Not that the 86-year-old’s recent performances have been all that different. Look at the much ridiculed people House of Gucci (2021), for example. The camerawork was sedate and not flashy, which was baffling for a film that seemed dazzling and flamboyant on the page. Maybe the fact that Scott quickly filmed an entire Christopher Plummer performance All the money in the world (2017) after Kevin Spacey was taken out has made him think it is possible to rush entire productions.

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Yet that doesn’t explain it Gladiator II‘s tone. Yes, the swords and scandals genre is ripe for campy parody – a wink here, a nudge there – but in the sequel to a film that was so bleak comes a film that feels as am-dram-absurdist as just pots . Critics have argued that this camp skew is typical of Scott over the past fifteen years, pointing to opinion-splintering historical dramas such as Napoleon (2023), which my colleague Louis Chilton wrote was “often and very deliberately hilarious,” in defense of the film’s lame, over-the-top screenplay. But be that as it may, I just can’t understand why a script so inert and bordering on parody is roundly praised for not taking itself seriously.

When Gladiator It premiered in May 2000 and successfully revived an ailing, outdated genre, one that had been brutally adulterated in Aeroplane! and Monty Python. This sequel feels like a step backwards; I bet Crowe is furious. As Maximus famously said, “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” He certainly hadn’t expected any accompanying laughter.

‘Gladiator II’ is in cinemas