Gladiator 2 is thrilling – even if Paul Mescal is no Russell Crowe

The older Ridley Scott gets, the less he cares about habits and expectations. There are only stories, and the thrills they elicit in his audience. How lucky we are to have that bravura. Gladiator, released in 2000 and currently at the bow of a miniature revival of the classical epic, was a relatively sombre and serious work. It threw grit in history’s eye.

Gladiator II is equal in scale and spectacle, and weighted with metaphor, but it’s also shot through with the kind of wry, absurdist slant that’s come to dominate Scott’s work of the last decade and a half, from Napoleon to Alien: Covenant. At times, Gladiator II is pure camp. To insist that it shouldn’t be is to hold on too tightly to the dour expectations of the 21st-century blockbuster.

It has a modern outlook but provides a throwback, too, to the genre’s florid history – a flirtatious Claudette Colbert marinating in her milk bath in 1932’s The Sign of the Cross, or a pouting Peter Ustinov as Emperor Nero lounging about in silks and velvets in 1951’s Quo Vadis. This time, they’ve put sharks in the Colosseum.

In one corner, we have Paul Mescal’s Lucius Verus, son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) and our deceased hero Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe). The grandson of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, he is rightful heir to the Roman empire, but was sent into exile as a boy in order to save him from murderous hands. The throne was instead claimed by dual emperors and brothers Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), as petulant and debauched as Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus.

In the other corner, there’s Denzel Washington as Macrinus, a former slave who’s amassed great wealth and has a keen interest in gladiator bouts. He scouts Lucius, now captured and enslaved – the film’s laziest element, since the cycles of history are hardly enough reason to repeat its predecessor’s set-up, dead wife included. Lucius wants revenge on the man who led the charge against his adoptive city, General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal, who plays conflicted with nobility and tenderness). Macrinus is happy to use him as an instrument for his own plans.

Washington takes pure, delicious revelry in the spoken word. David Scarpa’s script has its weak spots, but the actor treats it like Shakespeare, somehow discovering iambic pentameter where it doesn’t exist. He speaks in symphonies, drinks in power like wine, and, recognising the exquisite beauty of Janty Yates and David Crossman’s costumes, does some tremendous sleeve acting.

Mescal, meanwhile, plays Lucius as a man who’s never had a good night’s sleep. He’s a creature of rage, of the groggy and sweaty kind, yet touched by poetry (he’s a fan of Virgil’s Trojan epic The Aeneid). It’s not the same charismatic, instant star-maker of a performance as Crowe’s, but Mescal bears the weight of history and the film’s own legacy gracefully. So does Harry Gregson-Williams’s score, which often quotes Hans Zimmer’s original but offers its own moments of searing heroism.

Scott, famously dispassionate about historical accuracy, favours the vigorous deployment of the past as metaphor. This isn’t (in any way, really) recognisable as the actual Roman empire; rather its imagery is layered over the collective histories of white supremacist, Christian realms. Scott then repudiates how the supposed glories of the classical world have been weaponised over the centuries. Macrinus, here, is the outsider figure able to penetrate the inner circle, only to then perpetuate its cruelties in order to secure power. It’s potent, and ever-relevant.

But Scott being Scott, there’s no hesitation about letting these ideas sit side by side with the vision of Mescal bare-knuckle boxing a horde of CGI baboons. A naval battle staged in the Colosseum (an actual detail from history, minus the sharks) sees the camera attached to the front of one boat as it rams into the other, while Quinn, Hechinger, and their tiny pet monkey are perfectly pitched, frothing at the mouth and boyishly pathetic, as all good, mad emperors are. Gladiator II, in short, shows us how to make cinema with a capital “C”.

Dir: Ridley Scott. Starring: Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger, Derek Jacobi, Connie Nielsen, Denzel Washington. Cert 15, 148 mins.

‘Gladiator II’ is in cinemas from 15 November