“AAre you not entertained? Russell Crowe bellowed over the bodies of half a dozen armored warriors in the original Gladiator. It is a line that is etched in our collective memory. It also encapsulates Ridley Scott’s combative and feisty directorial approach to this muscular, business-like sequel. Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since the first film won five Oscars (including Best Picture and Best Actor for Crowe) in 2001, but what’s striking is how little has changed. Admittedly, there is a dash of fresh blood in it. Gladiator II passes the tunic and combat sandals to Paul Mescal, as the enslaved but noble warrior Lucius. It sees Denzel Washington sink his teeth into a peachy role as the slippery, ambitious gladiator master Macrinus, and ramps up the spectacle (and, it must be said, the silliness) with sharks in the Colosseum, a charging rhino and a terrifying CGI hell creature that appears to be part shaved baboon and part demon. Yes, we are entertained, how can we not be? But apart from sharks and rhinos, there are a lot of fresh ideas noticeably missing. This sequel is so derivative of its predecessor that it’s practically a remake.

This is evident from the start. Gladiator And Gladiator II both open with a shot of a male hand caressing grain. In the first film it is the Malickian image of Crowe’s meaty paw running through a field of golden wheat; in the second it is Mescal thoughtfully playing with some chicken feed. The symbolism is clear: they may be fearsome soldiers, but they are solid, simple men, anchored in the earth. The two share more than just a love of cereal: both suffer an almost identical double whammy of instigating incidents early on. Both lose loved ones and are enslaved by the Roman Empire, after which they channel their grief and anger into gladiatorial combat. They even share a signature move: a sparse beheading with two swords that serves as an emphatic final word in most disagreements.

The same paradoxical truths go to the heart of both images, which argue that the gladiatorial games – days of slaughter for the entertainment of the masses – represent everything that is rotten at the core of ancient Rome. Cruel and capricious leaders – in this case the giggling, quixotic double act of brother emperors Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) and Geta (Joseph Quinn) – use them as a distraction from the grim reality of the average Roman’s life, and as an easy way to get rid of enemies. At the same time, the violence and cruelty are rather the point of the film Gladiator movies. The visceral battle sequences are phenomenal – exquisitely choreographed, formidably executed and edited with stiletto precision. Sure, Scott can cloak it all in a cloak of honor and dignity, but ultimately… Gladiator films tap into exactly the kind of primal bloodlust that sends the Colosseum crowd into a baying frenzy.

It is for this reason that Gladiator II is quite binary and schematic in its approach to good versus evil. In the final camp, the Emperor Brothers are pleasantly gruesome. Caracalla has a pet monkey, an advanced form of syphilis, and the high-pitched, giddy laugh of a spiteful child. Geta is smarter, more calculating, and more vengeful, and wears so much fright mask makeup that he starts to look like Bette Davis in his films. What ever happened to baby Jane?. On the side of honor and virtue we have Lucius, essentially a cut-and-paste version of Crowe’s Maximus, with added fear. Mescal comes into the action well, bringing a chilling, sneering base note of desperation to his righteous anger. But he’s an actor who works best when digging into the small, textured details of a character, and this is a role that requires a more broad-shouldered and muscular approach. Crowe’s bullish, pugnacious lines from the first film are sorely missed here. The sole recurring protagonist, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), has been stripped of much of her minxy complexity and now defends, rather blandly, the egalitarian vision of Rome dreamed of by her father, Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Thank goodness, then, that Washington gives by far the toughest and most memorable performance as clever social climber Macrinus. The former slave is a slippery, ambivalent character who acts as a mentor and supporter to Lucius, but whose motives in this, as in all things, are solely self-interested. If we’re entertained, it’s not because the sharks or the monkeys are eating the supporting cast, but because Washington is gnawing bits out of the landscape every time he’s on screen.