Dude Rates Movies

Gladiator II

D
Poster of the movie
Ridley Scott | 2024 | USA, UK, Morocco, Canada
Saturday 23 November 2024 (watched, at the theater 📽️)

Gladiator worked because of the charisma of the lead character, because of emblematic visuals, and because of a strong character arc.

Here we have a lead character who looks like my old boss on some steroids, visuals consisting of a crappy CGI rhinoceros, and a plot focusing on politics.

The movie opens on a perfectly bland shot of a hand holding grains of wheat, to demonstrate its inability to create something as good as the emblematic hand of Russel Crowe fondling with a field of wheat; it ends with literally the music from the first opus, to demonstrate its inability to create something new at all. A perfect encapsulation of mediocrity.