Gladiator II review: Don't blame Paul Mescal but there's no good ...

At the centre of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, the sequel to his own 2000 smash, we are treated to a sea battle staged in a flooded Colosseum. Full-on ordnance, mighty galleys and, most controversially, man-eating sharks entertain hordes of cives Romani. They seem to be having a ball. Somewhere unseen by the camera, no doubt, blood-splattered critics for the next day’s newspaper, however, were scribbling unkind and pernickety notes about the vulgarity of it all. Why do the Gladiators have such good teeth? This isn’t nearly so good as the first Shark V Galleon. II stars!

Ha, ha. As if they had newspapers in third-century Rome. Well, they do in this film. And not chiselled into slabs either. Oh, to hell with period accuracy. When promoting Napoleon, Scott, quite properly, told historians where to stick their supposed anachronisms.

Both that film and Gladiator II (honestly, could they not have found a less straight-to-VHS title?) are in the tradition of golden-age epics that refracted ancient myths and legends through contemporaneous prisms. That synecdochal maritime set-piece – sharks ‘n’ all – is just right for goldfishy 21st century attention spans. It is also the sort of thing that is best seen on the biggest screen. Which is good.

Sadly, the rest of the film achieves little more coherence or lucidity. None of the dialogue is so memorable as the early sequence in which Paul Mescal looks like he’s fighting a vampire baboon from outer space. Too many motivations, even when addressed in clunky expository asides, make no narrative sense: you are my deadly enemy; now, for some reason or other, you are my close chum. Whether invented or not, the wider martial background is hopelessly jumbled. In the later stages we are asked to care about a battle between off-the-peg decadent Rome and an army that, if the era’s endless civil wars are any guide, seems likely to usher in just another school of tyranny. The screenplay is mere scaffolding on which to mount endless samey – albeit delightfully disgusting – exercises in competitive viscera-letting.

No blame should go the way of a fine cast. Mescal incants the spirits of Richards Harris and Burton back into gruff life. Denzel Washington wisely sticks to his own rich accent, but still calls up reminders of Laurence Olivier in Spartacus.

We first meet Lucius (Mescal), grandson of Marcus Aurelius (played by Harris in Gladiator), living an apparently happy life in provincial North Africa. Yeah, that’s going to last. When the Roman legions arrive, we get rapid confirmation that his open-faced wife, barely allowed a line of dialogue, is there merely to be slaughtered and to thus provide a revenge motive similar to that which drove Russell Crowe’s Maximus in the first film.

[ Paul Mescal battles savage monkeys and a stampeding rhino in new trailer for Gladiator sequelOpens in new window ]

Lucius ends up in Rome as the possession of sinister mogul Macrinus (Washington) and is fast propelled into the gladiatorial circus where he bites one of the intergalactic monkeys to death. His only desire is, however, to exercise his anger on the general (a forgettable Pedro Pascal) who led the assault on his village.

The actors are all properly committed. Strange to relate, there is not so huge a shift from Mescal’s flattened spirits in Normal People and Aftersun to the bloodthirsty warrior in this $250 million (at least) epic. The actor remains a merchant in convincing introversion. Washington rolls his vowels with an enthusiasm that sits just this side of camp relish. All good.

There is, however, never any convincing argument for the film to exist beyond the demand that something so lucrative should eventually generate something else equivalently lucrative (we’ll see). The narrative parallels with Gladiator – taking in soft-edged shadows of the earlier characters – only press home the current project’s second-hand status. It’s no Gladiator. It’s no Asterix the Gladiator.

Thumbs down.

Gladiator II is in cinemas from November 15th