By M. Faust

Image above: Photo by Aidan Monaghan/Aidan Monaghan – © 2024 Paramount Pictures.

Like the tables of tradition-minded American families this coming holiday, the Hollywood buffet is groaning with overstuffed turkeys. 

Of course, the turkeys we eat are lean and healthful, packed with protein. By contrast, two of the biggest offerings for what is one of the busiest moviegoing weeks of the year are fatty and about as nutritious as the leftover Halloween candy that no one wants to eat. 

Ridley Scott’s sequel to his 2000 Oscar-winner Gladiator is titled Gladiator II, though Son of Gladiator would have been more appropriate. Set 16 years after the original film, its script replays most of the same story beats, centering on Lucius (Paul Mescal), the son of the character played by Russell Crowe. The cast also includes Pedro Pascal as Marcus Acacius, a Roman general plotting a rebellion against the depraved rulers (Joaquin Phoenix’s character split into a pair of degenerate brothers); Connie Nielsen, the only returning performer, as Marcus Acacius’s wife and Lucius’s mother; and Denzel Washington hamming it up as a former slave who now oversees the gladitorial contests while scheming to take a more powerful position for himself. 

(Echoes of Hamlet and Othello are apparently only coincidental, though Washington will be performing the latter on Broadway next year.) 

While the original Gladiator was a self-conscious throwback to films like Ben Hur and Spartacus (with a soupcon of Caligula), Scott’s sequel aims no higher than the dozens of sword-and-sandal potboilers that the Italian film industry ground out in the early 1960s. It’s pretty much worthless as history: some of the characters are based on actual people, but only in the loosest ways, and the climactic return of Rome to democratic rule is nonsense. 

Scott’s disdain for historical accuray was widely commented on last year for his film Napoleon. Here, as if to thumb his nose at critics, he seems to have doubled down on making up whatever suits him. Paper didn’t exist at the time (at least not in Europe), much less the printing press, but this Rome not only has a newspaper but a kind of protypical Starbucks where Washington is seen reading it while sipping what we presume is either coffee or tea, beverages unknown to the Romans. 

Most ludicrous are the CGI-created monstrosities these gladiators are pitted against: a pack of blood-thirsting apes that are apparently supposed to be baboons, a charging rhinoceros ridden as if it were a horse, sharks swimming around in a flooded Colosseum to devour losers in a mock naval battle. (There is evidence of such a staged spectacle, but sharks? A salt water animal?) 

So much of this two and one-half hour movie is given to these scenes that it is clear that they are what most interested Scott about the project. You can make an argument in defense of them, as idiotic as they are: Gladitorial bouts were staged to placate the people of Rome in the face of the failures of their tyrannical rulers, and to recreate their effect for modern audiences requires more than watching half-naked men lop off each others’ limbs. That said, what Scott has made is a movie that considers filmgoers to be the modern equivalent of those Roman citizens. With a reported budget of close to $300 million, three times that of the original, Gladiator II is factory product with no epic sweep, just a lot of empty spectacle. 

Red One

Despite all the bad advance reviews of Red One, I admit that was looking forward to seing it. It’s hard not to have a soft spot for Dwayne Johnson, whose entire career going back to his wrestling days as The Rock is based on his self-awareness of his essential ridiculousness. This is a man who once played the Tooth Fairy: how can you not love him? And the premise of depicting Santa’s workshop as a quasi-military operation is not unpromising. 

Sadly, the movie is mostly just another bloated CGI stew. As a veteran North Pole Enforcement, Logistics and Fortification officer (E.L.F., ha ha), Johnson has to search the world when Santa (J. K. Simmons) is kidnapped. His unwilling partner is an online bounty hunter (played by Chris Evans in a role that you just know was written with Ryan Reynolds in mind), and the odd-couple sparks between the two, if predictable, are the best parts of the movie. Far less so are endless computer-generated sequences featuring Krampus and a wicked witch named Gryla who — ah, it’s not worth describing, The whole thing runs over two hours and isn’t terribly appropriate for young children. Didn’t the creators of this product understand that a Christmas hit is one that appeals to both kids and parents?