Gladiator II

There’s obviously a spectrum of sequels: most sequels are just more of the same, which makes them inherently a bit less good than the original. Sometimes, of course, you see a sequel that is better than the original (“X-Men 2”), indeed sometimes much better (“The Dark Knight”). Then there are sequels that are bad (“X-Men 3”), and indeed some so bad that we collectively agree they never happened (why, for instance, did we jump from “Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home” to “Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country”?). And then, very very occasionally, you get a sequel that perfectly complements and elevates the original, somehow serving to not only be great in their own right but to actually make the original film retroactively better (“The Godfather Part Two”, “The Empire Strikes Back”).

But “Gladiator II” has achieved something that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before: it perfectly complements the original and diminishes the whole, retroactively making the first film worse.

It actually starts off well enough, beginning with a Roman attack on a frontier city, this time shown from the point of view of the defenders. Good stuff. Naturally, the Romans are victorious and our hero finds himself made a slave, and then a gladiator.

The story then unfolds in much the same way as the original. And all the characters from the original are present, but each is moved around the board one space: we have the person of colour who is a co-gladiator and friend to our hero… but this time he dies early. We have the stablemaster (Denzel Washington instead of Oliver Reed), but he’s not the benign figure from the original. We have not one, but two made emperors… but they never set foot in the arena. And so on and so forth.

And it’s fine, for about two thirds of the run time – a completely unnecessary sequel-by-numbers that would ordinarily fit into my very first category.

And then it goes horribly wrong. It’s almost as if the writers knew the story they wanted to write, knew how it should all play out to a certain point, knew what the end-point should be from there, but just couldn’t make the last few dots line up. And so the last forty minutes consist of everything falling apart in a stream of nonsense, characters making endless bad decisions because they need to because of the plot, characters announcing the plot because otherwise it’s just incomprehensible… basically, it’s a mess.

And, as I said, it all fits perfectly with the original, such that the two now feel permanently entangled. They’re not two separate films; they’re two parts of a whole. This film makes the original feel worse than it did before.

Avoid.