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Message: [QUOTE="ZooCougar, post: 5131425, member: 296"] [B]Gladiator II. I am not entertained.[/B] If there is a director who has fallen off worse than Ridley Scott then please point them out to me. His movies get resourced to the hilt and he pumps out a pretty lame product despite this. From the plastic The Martian, the soulless Alien sequels, and the laughably bad Napoleon that failed to improve on history that butchered and diluted famous battles to the point where they were recognizable. If Ridley Scott made a movie about Gettysburg would he film it at the Jersey shore, would Lee fire cannons at the Liberty Bell in Philly? Gladiator is a classic. It might be the very best sword and sandal film. Great plot, great actors, great villain great effects even. It's unanimous agreed to be great. Gladiator II? Literally the same plot, terrible acting, laughable effects and a movie that seems like it was edited by a drunk intern. Like the first Gladiator, II opens with a big set piece battle. A Roman Fleet laden with troops approaches a beleaguered city. But the whole thing is so dumb because it looks as if Ridley Scott went to Generative AI and prompted "Roman Navy Attacking with a storm behind it". We've seen this before, I think it was in Kingdom of Heaven.... Anyways. Our hero Hanno/Lucius played by Paul Mescal (He's Maximus's illegitimate son, crazy right?) gets captured and made a slave (what a coincidence!) and what do you know he gets to try out as a Gladiator! And this is where the movie flies of the rails hard. So hard. Hanno is a Carthiginian name, Hannibal's son was named Hanno and Hannibal was the General who vexed Rome and would have taken them out if his government hadn't screwed him over. Scott is trying to be clever here but it's likely lost on 99 percent of the audience. Hanno and his Numidian pals get to fight against a bunch of enormous homicidal baboons that have probably never existed. Maybe these guys were crossbred with the Xenomorphs from Aliens. Ridley is trying to be clever here. It gets worse. Later on they turn the Roman Coloseum into Sea World. Now there is some historical evidence that this might have happened. I'm quite certain they were staged affairs like Disney On Ice, and there weren't Great White Sharks thrown into the mix for good measure. Now to the acting. Paul Mescal has all of the charisma and creativity of a third string striker at 4th Division English Football Club. That's literally how he plays this character, imagine an Englishman trying to be a North African in 200 AD. Pedro Pascal who is in everything these days, is completely wasted here. And he knows it because as I said before; he put more effort into the Corona commercials. His character is a sort fo a reluctant Roman General. It's literally one of the only interesting things about this movie and they didn't do much with it. Also somehow he's married to Connie Nielson who must be 20 years older than him. It doesn't work at all. And finally we have Denzel who mighty have been the only actor that tried in this movie. His acting abilities are such a stark contrast between the rest of the faces in this film. He's a decent villain, better than the two idiots playing the Emperors. Those two were so ridiculous that they make Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus seem reasonable. I think the movie is the second in a row for Scott where his actors didn't really buy in. I don't think [/QUOTE]

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