Long before “thinking about the Roman Empire” became shorthand for having a hyperfixation, Ridley Scott turned the actual Roman Empire into a mainstream obsession. In 2000, the director’s sword-and-sandals blockbuster Gladiator clawed its way to become the second highest-grossing film of that year, before winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and cementing its status as – I’m just guessing – your dad’s favorite movie of all time. “Aren’t you entertained?!” Russell Crowe’s Maximus electrified the crowd in a memorably stirring scene. We really were: here was an almost absurdly simple tale of revenge that Scott, via visceral fight scenes (and real tigers), turned into a maximalist epic.

For Gladiator IInow in theaters, Scott has somehow taken it one step further. The sequel has twice as many heroes to champion and twice as many emperors to battle, plus a wildcard in the form of Macrinus, Denzel Washington’s conniving arms dealer. Instead of tigers, fights in the arena now involve a menagerie of baboons, sharks and a rhino. Even the opening credits are designed to captivate the audience: key scenes from the previous film are animated in a painterly sequence, ending on a title card that stylizes the sequel’s name as, gloriously, GLADIIATOR. It’s so grand that the audience at my screening started applauding before a single fight had even started.

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Set 16 years after the events of Gladiatorthe sequel follows Lucius (Paul Mescal), the son of Maximus and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, reprising her role). Lucilla secretly sent the young Lucius to the kingdom of Numidia for his protection after the death of Maximus. A lot has happened in the years since, which we learn through overly ornate flashbacks and exposition. Lucius has come to resent his homeland and his mother, given their time apart. That resentment grows into anger after Roman forces, led by Lucilla’s new husband, General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), conquer Numidia in an opening battle that leads to the death of Lucius’ wife. Meanwhile, in Rome, a pair of snotty brothers named Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) have become co-emperors. Their reckless leadership inspired a resistance led by Lucilla and Acacius and made the city fertile ground for the rise of opportunistic power players like Macrinus.

The plot, packed with shadowy conspiracies and devious characters, is much less simple than that in Gladiatorto his detriment. But amid all the fuss, Scott talks about how difficult it can be to break the cycle of ambition and retaliation. Bloodshed is the cause and effect of every twist in the story, the reason behind Rome’s tumult and the apparent solution to its misery. Violence demands attention, and Gladiator II draws tension from the fact that many of the characters cannot escape their attraction to brutality. In Scott’s hands, ancient Rome has never been more brutal – or more exciting to watch.

The director is a master at coaxing elegance out of rough set pieces. During the attack on Lucius’ house, cinders swirl like snow, water and mud splash into the camera lens, and every blow of a sword or punch lands with primal intensity. In the Colosseum, despite the noticeably intensive use of CGI, Scott finds striking images in the chaos: a pool of blood blooms underwater. An arrow shoots across the field. A gladiator throws sand in the air. These shots are fascinating to the viewer and convey the strange allure of battle to the fighters themselves.

These energetic fight scenes are complemented by a collection of flashy performances, with those playing the villains stealing the show. Mescal and Pascal embody the gravity of their roles and go almost wild when forced into the Colosseum. But Quinn and Hechinger have a lot more fun leaning into their characters’ boyish prickliness, echoing Joaquin Phoenix’s work as the man-child emperor, Commodus, from Gladiator. Washington, however, runs away with the film: Armed with a Cheshire cat grin, heaps of jewelry and seemingly unlimited glasses of wine, Macrinus plays with Rome as if it were a huge chessboard full of pawns, and the actor embraces the script’s numerous swerves. . He imbues the character with an infectious cheerfulness in every scene, whether he’s cheering on the men taking each other down in the arena or quietly trying to manipulate Lucius into doing his bidding.

For all the fun it has, Gladiator II does require a working knowledge of its predecessor’s story to understand the stakes, which also means it magnifies the original film’s shortcomings. The characters are more thinly drawn, with superficial motivations despite the contrivances of the plot. The dialogue is more stilted, full of poignant observations about the “dream of Rome” in the face of an empire that repeatedly fails to learn its lesson. And the ending puts forward the vague idea that Rome’s future depends on uniting its people – a sincere sentiment perhaps, but a rather dull conclusion to reach after two hours of brutality.

Once more, Gladiator II does not pretend to offer more than pure spectacle. The finale gestures toward the idea that hope is its own form of power, but even Lucius admits that he has limits as a force for peace. “You look to me to speak,” Lucius says, addressing enemy armies about to fight. “I don’t know what to say.” Perhaps Macrinus, who believes Rome is doomed to cruelty and bloodshed, has a point when he claims that violence is “the universal language.” After all, to use the words of a respected gladiator, it is undeniably entertaining.