I missed this in theaters but gave it a stream. I think the film could have been salvaged in the editing room, but it wasn’t. I get the sense there was a lot of backroom editing involved in this one. It was just painfully constructed. Tone shifts were jarring, going from gory action set pieces to dudes going on about Greek philosophy for twenty minutes. The film couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a serious follow-up or a campy deconstruction.
I reckon there were three iterations in the editing room:
1. Scott’s original cut akin to the first movie, but overly long and full of pointless bullshit about the ‘dream of Rome’ that nobody wanted to listen to.
2. Woke-influenced campfest meant to showcase black people and women. Wife who gets shot in the first ten minutes of the movie probably got more screen time, hence the emotional weight we’re expected to have towards her even though she’s barely shown in the finished film.
3. Revised de-woked cut after the trailer backlash, fucking up with a lot of the character development, but at least restoring the original ethos of the movie and not making it into a subversive flick akin to Joker 2. Since most of the film was finished, the cut was rushed and led to a story lacking character development and motivation, which in my opinion is the biggest reason the film falls flat.
Think about it, the only reason the twin emperors are bad is because the film tells us they are coupled with a scene of some angry peasants complaining about food. Compare this to how Commodus was developed in the first film. We have zero reason to care about the protagonist until more than halfway through the film, and even that’s debatable. The wife thing doesn’t work at all. The film only works because Lucilla is in it and that serves as a connection to the first film. If she was an unrelated character the audience wouldn’t care and the whole movie would be a disaster.
I’m surprised this didn’t flop harder considering it got a B on Cinemascore. That may as well be an F for a film like this.
