Gladiator/Gladiator II vs. The Robe/Demetrius and the Gladiators. Fight!

Well, I’ve been bedridden for three weeks. It gave me more time to do nothing than you’ll find outside the morgue. With all this extra time, and no energy, I spent a lot of it watching old movies. I watched many of them with the sound off. With old movies, you don’t need the sound, because you’ve memorized the dialogue already. With new movies, the audio doesn’t help, because no modern actor can utter sounds that form themselves into intelligible words.

I’d heard that Gladiator got a sequel. This sounded like a bad idea to my ear. The main character was dead. Unless you start in with clones and it was only a dream shenanigans, there’s really no getting around that problem. And since Russell Crowe is currently auditioning for the role of the Hindenburg at this point, the idea should have been left on the slush pile.

Speaking of the slush pile, way back when, they actually had a clone/dream/soap opera script for Gladiator 2 ready to go, and it was a doozy, even by modern Hollyweird standards:

It was later revealed to be written under the working title of “Christ Killer”. Cave described the plot as a “deities vs. deity vs. humanity” story. The story involved Maximus in purgatory, who is resurrected as an immortal warrior for the Roman gods. Maximus is sent back to Earth and tasked with ending Christianity by killing Jesus and his disciples, as Christianity was draining the power of the ancient Pagan gods. During his mission, Maximus is tricked into murdering his own son. Cursed to live forever, Maximus fights in the Crusades, World War II, and the Vietnam War; with the ending revealing that in the present-day, the character now works at the Pentagon.

Okey dokey then. Being ill myself, I began to wonder if they skipped Word War I because Maximus had a case of the Spanish Flu. The premise begins to sound like Trilby-wearing neckbeard internet atheists re-making Plan 9 From Outer Space on a 500-million dollar budget, with Russell Crowe standing in for Bela Lugosi this time. But cooler, more jaded heads prevailed, and they shelved that idea, and decided to make the kind of sequel that originally gave sequels a bad name. Gladiator II is a bad movie, or would be, if it knitted itself into a coherent story, rendering it capable of being disliked. I’m not sure Hollywood is capable of making a good movie anymore. If they can, they won’t.

Gladiator II is filled with all the usual mandatory tropes required to appease Tinsel Town hall monitors. Scrawny female warriors manning the battlements, pulling on compound bows with their stick arms, and casting black men as Berbers and so forth. There’s all this vague and endless blather about returning Rome to its intellectual and moral roots. Problem is, Rome really never had any intellectual or moral roots. They imported their philosophers from Greece, used them to teach their children for twenty minutes daily before their eight hours of gym class, and founded the greatest pillage machine in the history of the world. Rome was a military administrative state, nothing more. The Pax Romana was best summed up by one of their abler opponents: They made a desert, and called it peace. You can’t fix what ain’t broken.

So in G2, the most recent co-emperors Caracalla and his brother were perverted nuts. Big deal. That’s bound to be a bit of a hard sell what with the people populating our modern administrative state. Caligula would be considered something of a hidebound square at a DEI conclave.

And especially missing in all this is that having capricious, vicious emperors is the only counterweight a Senate-run clip joint like the Roman Empire could handle. The United States has learned what happens when the supreme executive is completely unable to rein in the legislature, and vice versa. In any arrangements the Roman Empire could come up with, having one running roughshod over the other, and taking turns doing it, was inevitable, and probably necessary. Marcus Aurelius’ little self help book is more Jack Handy than Niccolo Machiavelli if you’re looking for an operating manual for an empire.

At any rate, the original Gladiator movie was just a retread itself, of movies from the 1950s. It was lots of fun, and made all sorts of money. Won Oscars. It was all a happy accident, of course, like so many good movies. The script was pretty bad, but they lucked out when hired Russell Crowe. He told the director his lines stunk and his character was as wooden as the freed gladiator’s bowling trophy sword, demanded input, and got it. They listened to him, including, IIRC, re-naming the character.

Russell Crowe looked and acted like someone who could kill somebody. He had a fit for purpose stevedore physique, and a beard that didn’t look like it belonged on a drag queen. He came up with all the good lines in the movie, and spat them out with what looked like real fury. Crowe stood toe to toe and held his own with world class masculine maniac Oliver Reed, while being cozened into killing people for more than shit and giggles again. His journey through the alimentary canal of downscale Roman life made sense, and led to a sensible conclusion. Well, maybe not sensible, but certainly not risible, like Gladiator II.

The only vaguely masculine-looking person in Gladiator II besides Denzel Washington is Connie Nielson, twenty-five years on. I forget the main character’s name in the movie, and also the name of the actor who plays him, which is a bit of a bad sign, I think. I gather he’s the more recent version of a tough guy. A bit fey, like a guy who flexes in front of the mirror in the Planet Fitness and kisses his weak but oversize biceps when no one’s looking. He has plenty in common with Joaquin Phoenix’ Commodus from the first movie, which is another bad sign, because I remembered those names. A memorable sissy demeanor is not the way to go for Hondo, or Honcho, or Plaxico Burress, or whatever they called the poor dude trying to carry G2 on his back.

They raided Sun Ra’s wordrobe and put Denzel Washington in it. I think Denzel was perfect for his part. He’s all wrong of course, for a Berber emperor. Berbers were whiter than I am. But hey, Denzel. It’s an action picture, and Denzel has been making a fine living in the sprawling, geriatric mass-murder spree entertainment industry that’s keeping geezers like Liam Neeson busy lately. He’s great at projecting force. I swear I could still hear his dialog, even with the sound off. He doesn’t act with other people. He acts at other people. Since he’s supposed to be a pushy murderer, he isn’t lost in his role.

But he is. There’s really nothing for him to do worth doing. The politics of the thing are as murky as a school board takeover, but less interesting.

[To be continued]