Gladiator II didn’t ‘fail’ but Russell Crowe is right about one thing

Gladiator actor Russell Crowe has decided an appropriate enough amount of time has passed that he can happily rip into the 2024 sequel of the film that cemented him as a Hollywood A-Lister, more than a quarter of a century ago.

The New Zealander famously played the titular gladiator, Maximus, in Sir Ridley Scott’s original film; he was a Roman general on a quest for vengeance after the murder of his wife and son following his refusal to swear loyalty to the corrupt new emperor, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix).

Crowe – who won an Oscar for his efforts – wasn’t involved with the sequel, which saw Paul Mescal star as Lucius Verus, the secret son of Maximus and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), daughter to former emperor Marcus Aurelius and sister to Commodus.

However, past comments of Crowe’s made it clear he wasn’t particularly thrilled that a follow-up film had come to fruition, and now he’s doubled down on them.

Over the weekend at the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily, he criticised Gladiator II in no uncertain terms, saying it had ‘failed’ – pointing to its box office, which was almost identical to that of the original, but over two decades later and not accounting for inflation nor its significantly increased budget (£347m for number one vs $344.3m for number two).

Now I don’t think Gladiator II was a failure – I reviewed it favourably and think it delivered plenty on the spectacle front, while Mescal rose to the occasion as best he could, filling the sandals of Crowe’s Maximus.

It is true though that there was something missing in Lucius’s character development, so tied as he was to his parents, while even the sequel’s most ardent fans would agree it didn’t live up to the heights of the first. As happens with many sequels, things can sway between repetitive and overcomplicated, to avoid accusations of rehashing the first beloved movie.

I also totally understand filmmaker Scott’s desire to revisit cinematic territory that was so fertile the first time around; it’s a temptation hard to resist.

But I do understand Crowe’s argument for why he thinks the long-gestating second film didn’t deliver, in his eyes.

While speaking onstage on Saturday, he explained, per Deadline, how he resisted filming a sex scene with co-star Nielsen in Gladiator because ‘this is a story about a man who’s avenging the death of his wife and his child’.

‘There cannot be a moment on that journey where he stops and has sex with somebody. It doesn’t make any sense because that destroys the journey,’ he added, sharing that, while he resisted a lot of pushbacks, director Scott ‘agreed with me back then, that that was the moral core of the film’.

But in his opinion, he said once again that the second movie ‘destroys that moral centre’ by focusing on the son that Maximus had with Lucilla, a relationship that wasn’t central to Maximus’s vengeance mission in the first film.

Initially I was sceptical reading this, wondering if Crowe was about to start preaching morals to the world in some sort of puritanical drive.

But as he explained the way that the first Gladiator was ‘shooting for something really, really old-fashioned’ with the simple devotion of a husband and father to this wife and son at the very heart of it, I started to get it.

Mescal’s Lucius was given similar motivations with the deaths of his wife and child, but not the same clear-cut vengeance as his journey was also tied to the discovery of his parentage.

‘On the surface, Gladiatoris a movie for men but if it was a movie for men, it would be about revenge. But it’s not about revenge. It’s a movie for women because it’s about vengeance and this is a subtle difference, but it is a difference. I needed the character to stay on that track,’ Crowe added, with audiences vindicating him by skewing more female than male when it arrived in cinemas.

Gladiator isn’t a revenge movie. It’s a romance. And as its star argues, that’s why it became one of the most popular movies of all time, consistently available to watch across primetime television or on streaming services around the world.

Some may disagree but as Crowe pointed out: ‘We all want to be that guy who can stay that strong, if you’re a man. And if you’re a woman, we all want a man to love us in that way.’

You could argue that it might not split so neatly down the gender line as its star sees it, but you can’t argue that everybody doesn’t want to be loved hard enough to inspire vengeance in this life – or the next.