Coming up with a logical sequel to the Oscar-winning blockbuster from 2000 Gladiator was not an obvious task, as the original’s hero, Russell Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius, does not survive the film. Rather than going back in time and proposing an origin story for Maximus, director Ridley Scott and his longtime screenwriter David Scarpa (Napoleon, All the money in the world) have chosen to set the story a generation after the events of the first film. That choice wasn’t a bad one in itself: the prequel as an excuse for franchise expansion has become such a cliché that it’s generated its own genre of online jokes (see: a particularly maddening news story or social phenomenon someone’s villain origin story ‘ to call). ”). But Gladiator 2 (or as it is spelled in the opening title, GladIIator) unfortunately comes across less as a reinvention of the original than as a strangely literal retread of its plot beats, characters, and themes.

Scott, still an active and relevant filmmaker at 86, isn’t returning to this material to cash in on audiences waiting for the sequel to a 24-year-old sword-and-sandals epic. I just looked at the early 19^ecentury face of tyranny NapoleonOnce a history buff, Scott now seems interested in turning his attention to power and corruption in Imperial-era Rome. In heart and soul, Gladiator 2 is more a drama of palace intrigue than an action movie, even though Scott serves up a surfeit of swordplay, shield-smashing and helmet-bashing the size of a Roman banquet. Scott has always known how to direct a thrilling action sequence on a grand scale, but the advances of CGI have made those elaborate spectacles less plausible and harder not to chuckle through: did we really need the full-on naval battle in the Colosseum? to be complete with circling sharks?

If you answer that question with a hearty “Hell, yeah!” then maybe Gladiator 2 is the holiday movie for you. But I can’t guarantee that a taste for bread and circuses will get you through the dramatic longueurs of this two-and-a-half-hour saga, which would be unbearably boring without the presence of one man – not our noble and self-confident man. -sacrificial hero, but his clever nemesis. If Russell Crowe’s unyielding star power came first Gladiator memorable (even with stiff competition from a young Joaquin Phoenix as the mad Emperor Commodus), which remains Gladiator 2 driving is the charismatic villainy of Denzel Washington as the deceptively easy-going courtier Macrinus. Paul Mescal’s Lucius, the nominal hero and long-exiled heir of the now legendary Maximus, is given little more to do than pine for his slaughtered wife and grimly trudge, always outnumbered, through one battle sequence after another.

If Gladiator 2 Beginnings, Lucius lives humbly as a farmer in a North African colony, though his origins are easily guessed from clues in an early flashback. (The revelation of his true identity is also revealed in the film’s trailer.) When Lucius is kidnapped by the Roman army to be sold into slavery after murdering his wife – a setup dishearteningly identical to the first film – Macrinus, a former slave turned human flesh trader, notices the young man’s fire and fighting prowess and takes it upon himself to train him for the gladiator ring.

Meanwhile, the greatness that was Rome is being destroyed by two conceited, pleasure-seeking brothers, co-emperors Geta (Stranger things‘ Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (The White LotusFred Hechinger). These dissolute and vaguely inbred despots, one of whom goes everywhere with a gaily dressed monkey on his shoulder, stand in stark contrast to Lucius’ grandfather Marcus Aurelius, the wise and principled leader of just two generations before.

Upon his arrival in Rome, the invincible and, not for nothing, handsome Lucius becomes a fan favorite at the Colosseum, where bloodthirsty crowds cheer as human bodies are torn apart by tigers or attacked by warriors on rhinos (unfortunately, unlike in the previous movie). In the 2000 film, there are no images of lavish banquet tables groaning under platters of roasted rhino heads). When Lucius’ mother, the noblewoman Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, reprising her role from the 2000 film), discovers that her long-lost son is back in Rome and regularly being served to wild animals, she visits him in his prison cell to try to heal the rift caused by their long-ago divorce. Lucilla is married to the empire’s greatest military leader, General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), a good man tormented by the senseless bloodshed of the emperors’ wars of conquest; Like Crowe’s character in the original, he secretly assembles a rebel army to reclaim Rome for the people.

It’s inevitable that Lucius and Marcus Acacius will be forced to face each other in the gladiatorial arena, but when they do, it’s such a Dudley Do-Rights battle that it’s hard to generate interest. Mescal and Pascal can both be great actors in the right roles, but they don’t seem comfortable as beefcake daddy warriors in pleated miniskirts. While they both look impressively ripped and can fight their way through a convincing fight scene, they never – unlike Crowe in the first film – manage to turn brooding while muscled into a dramatically compelling chase. Luckily, Washington is there to liven up the proceedings with his sneaky humor and unexpected line readings. (“That’s politicsssss,” he tells another character at one point, somehow investing that long “s” with such a cynical excess of meaning that he confused the entire audience with a simple, drawn-out consonant.)

When pedants came after Scott about the historical accuracy of some details in last year’s Napoleonthe venerable director of genre-innovating classics such as Stranger And Blade Runner hilariously advised his haters to “get a life.” And he’s right: it’s the touches of humorous excess in his recent historical epics (cf. Ben Affleck’s magnificently campy turn as a lost count in The last duel) that stand out as the film’s most memorable moments. The problem with Gladiator 2 isn’t the xenomorph-like design of the giant CGI baboons put on poor Lucius in the Colosseum; it’s the audience’s sense that we’ve seen much of this before, sometimes quite literally, as scenes from the original film are revisited in recurring soft-focus flashbacks. Aren’t we entertained? Well, we were back inside 2000.