Gladiator II thrills - even if Mescal is no Russell Crowe

Ridley Scott’s belated sequel has it all: sharks, monkeys, and the joy of Denzel Washington’s Shakespearean enunciation. At times, this movie is pure camp, writes Clarisse Loughrey

- Clarisse Loughrey

The older Ridley Scott gets, the less he cares about habits and expectations. There are only stories, and the thrills they elicit in his audience. How lucky we are to have that bravura. Gladiator, released in 2000 and currently at the bow of a miniature revival of the classical epic, was a relatively sombre and serious work. It threw grit in history’s eye. Gladiator II is equal in scale and spectacle, and weighted with metaphor, but it’s also shot through with the kind of wry, absurdist slant that’s come to dominate Scott’s work of the last decade and a half, from Napoleon to Alien: Covenant.

★★★★☆

At times, Gladiator II is pure camp. To insist that it shouldn’t be is to hold on too tightly to the dour expectations of the 21stcentury blockbuster. It has a modern outlook but provides a throwback, too, to the genre’s florid history – a flirtatious Claudette Colbert marinating in her milk bath in 1932’s The Sign of the Cross, or a pouting Peter Ustinov as Emperor Nero lounging about in silks and velvets in 1951’s Quo Vadis. This time, they’ve put sharks in the Colosseum.