I think we have a tradition of seeing movies on Thanksgiving. We do when there’s good movies out, or at least when we find something interesting. Early reviews got me excited about Gladiator 2 and so we went.
And boy did it go. 3 hours of general questions that pretty much left me at….how did we get to this point?
It would seem like we had a completely different director and to be sure, I went back and rewatched Gladiator 1 to make sure it WAS the same director. I’m not sure time did him many favors on his directorial talent because the first movie was a masterpiece. History be damned all, it came across as a great story of revenge, explaining things succinctly and pretty much gave a reason for every scene. Gladiator 2, however, gave us a mess that I had no idea how to decode.
The new Emperors were there, crazy and giving it their best, but they never quite explained anything of how those 2 assholes truly came to rule. They weren’t related to anyone? The real history talks of their father taking over and then they poisoned him, but they could have shown that and cut a half hour of the script to make it truly memorable. They did their best to be crazy and came off as 2 whiny jerks. And if we’re taking liberties, adding sharks in the arena takes the cake. While I’m certain they were aware of sharks, I’m also quite certain of the difficulties of getting a shark into the arena in the first place. Worst yet, the main character’s motivation is severely lacking in it’s desires and while Denzel acted like Denzel, everyone else couldn’t hold a candle to that.
Which sucks. Save yourself some money and wait for it to come out streaming, because it’ll likely be on Prime bargains pretty soon.