Minor spoilers for Gladiator 2 to follow.
Gladiator 2 is a big and silly film. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. Big and silly films exist on a spectrum – let’s call it the Good/Bad Big Silly Film Spectrum – that stretches from The Emoji Movie at one end to Top Gun: Maverick (a modern masterpiece of big silly cinema) at the other. Thankfully, Gladiator 2 lives a lot closer to the latter end of that spectrum.
There's a genuinely kind of breathtaking sense of scale to the whole thing. Legions of marching men, people fighting Rhinos in the Colosseum – it reeks of Ridley Scott. (In a good way. Eau de Ridley). It reeks of old Hollywood. It's a big silly film after all.
With that inevitably comes some good old pushing of limits, some of which might include the limits of credibility. To consider their merit, and the film's really, we need to consider these moments. We need to consider the big silliness of the big and silly film. But wait! Don't do it yourself! We've done it for you. This is our ranking of the silliest moments in Gladiator 2.
8. The monkeys
Long before his ascent through the gladiatorial ranks brings him to the spotlights and the… ahem, colossal, scale of the Colosseum, Paul Mescal and his fellow slaves are forced into a small arena somewhere more like the ancient Roman equivalent of a retail park off a ring road, to fight some monkeys. But they aren’t just regular monkeys. In fact, I’m not really sure they’re any kind of monkey at all. No fur, shark-like teeth, bodies like medium-sized dogs on steroids and temperaments like medium-sized hurricanes… psycho killers, qu'est-ce que c'est?
7. The Mescal Monkey Bite™
So obviously the monkeys are horrible and vicious and immediately set about gnashing up all the poxy little humans in their wake. Except for one, or course. Our intrepid hero manages to not only inflict apparent serious harm on one of his simian foes with his comparatively tiny little human teeth, but then also wins their respect/fear by doing a big monkey-like scream out of a mouth that’s now all stained with monkey blood (because of his monkey biting) in the face of one of the horrible hurricane monkeys. To be fair to Ridley Scott, he has said in an interview that this was meant to be funny, and it is. Sort of. It’s also kind of horrible, to the extent that it might well instil within you a permanent, low-level fear of Paul Mescal and the barbarian brutishness that seems to exist somewhere deep within him. Ha ha. Good one, Ridley.
6. “They can eat WAR”
Practical Pedro Pascal’s army commander tries explaining to Fred Hechinger’s loony co-emperor that while it’s all very well going to African cities and smashing them up and taking all their stuff, it might be worth diverting some attention away from that sort of activity for a while and instead focusing it on making sure Rome can attend to the needs of its people, who are currently whinging about their lack of access to such opulent luxuries as “food”. Fred’s response is quoted above. An explanation of how this might work, practically speaking, does not follow.
5. Mescal’s fighting chops
As our hero-in-waiting, our peoples’ champion of the gladiatorial arena, Mescal is obviously posited as the best fighter this side of anywhere. How else is he going to fight his way to the top? Except that, when he’s given a sort of trial match by Denzel Washington, who’s trying to decide if he wants to adopt this scrappy young slave as his next Pokémon, Mescal doesn’t really look all that impressive? He’s fairly evenly matched by his foe, and his foe is… some portly middle-aged guy who looks like he spends his weekends drinking Stella, supporting *insert whichever football team you think is most racist* and writing unpleasant untruths about immigrants on Facebook pages that have poppies as their profile pictures? How are we to believe that Paul is the gladiator to end all gladiators, when he isn’t even the gladiator to end Steve from down the boozer?
4. Mescal’s all-day rowing machine workout the day before a big fight
Sorry to focus on Paul again, but this one really isn’t his fault. The day before one of his big fights in the area, Paul gets in trouble for being all mouthy and going on to his fellow enslaved gladiators about their “freedom” and that (again). His punishment is an all-day rowing machine workout. No breaks. Ask any PT and they’ll tell you this is a terrible idea. Sure it’s great conditioning work, and as part of a well-planned and varied fitness programme it’d do his muscular endurance and aerobic capacity a world of good, but the day before a fight? He’ll be knackered! One can only hope he was straight into the cryo chamber (or at the very least an ice bath) for recovery after.
3. Fred Hechinger’s enfant terrible
“They can eat WAR” isn’t exactly an isolated incident, vis-a-vis Caracalla (Hechinger)’s childlike tendencies. He grins at the violence before him in the Colosseum with a pleasure and absence of empathy you could only really attribute to a child who doesn’t understand what’s happening (or maybe a psychopath). He’s got a weird little pet monkey he seems to care about more than any human, and when Mescal and his first proper challenger are set to engage in a fist-fight for his entertainment, he demands “swords!” with the temerity you might’ve once employed to bag yourself some breastmilk. Eventually, we get a sort-of explanation – not psychopathy, but an unnamed STD that’s “spreading from his loins”. Since when is one of the symptoms of any STD that it turns you into a toddler?
2. Oh, this old thing? It’s vintage
Just before his final big fight, the fight to end all fights, Paul is led down to a sort of informal secret shrine in the bowels of the Colosseum, and presented with the very same armour and sword used by father Maximus (Russell Crowe) back in his day. They just had that down there. Just kickin' about. What the film is telling us here, in the cinematic equivalent of a note scrawled in block-caps crayon and posted into your face, is that this film is actually a sequel to another, very successful film – remember? Remember?!
1. Sharks in the Colosseum
Does what says on tin. It's sharks. In the Colosseum. During a big water battle thing in the Colosseum (which they apparently would actually do, but more as a sort of primary-school-play-esque re-enactment than an actual fight), a little extra peril is sprinkled into the big murdery fight, by way of some sharks swimming about in the water that they've filled the Colosseum with. How did they get the sharks in there? How do they get the sharks out? One imagines the drawing of straws. One imagines some poor guy with a net.
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