"Gladiator II" and "Juror #2"

So, what have our seniormost senior directors been up to lately?

If you like the first "Gladiator" movie, you'll probably like "Gladiator II."    It's very much a retread of the first movie, starring a new hero named Hanno (Paul Mescal), whose wife is killed in a battle against invading Roman forces under General Acacius (Pedro Pascal), and ends up a gladiator owned by the conniving ex-slave Macrinus (Denzel Washington).  Acacius turns out to be married to Lucilla (Connie Neilson) from the first "Gladiator," and secretly planning to overthrow the degenerate twin emperors currently in charge of Rome, Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger).

I've missed good, old-fashioned action spectaculars like "Gladiator," where the director isn't afraid to kill off most of the cast, because they need to worry about sequels or setting up a franchise.  The killings here are also very graphic, and often very creative.  Hanno fights an opponent who rides a rhinoceros into the area.  Later, the Coliseum is flooded so that a naval battle can be reenacted.  I'm betting that when the actual Romans did it, they didn't put sharks in the water to chow down on the unfortunate combatants, but historically gladiators didn't typically battle to the death anyway, so historical accuracy wasn't really ever in the cards.  When we're out of the arena, "Gladiator II" isn't too interesting.  The characters are thin, though the excellent cast is very good at pretending they aren't.  Denzel Washington is the most fun to watch as the genial villain, Macrinus, who steals every single scene he's in.

I'm not a big fan of the original "Gladiator," but the movie assumes that I am, spending the whole opening sequence replaying the greatest hits from "Gladiator," and recycling a lot of the visual motifs.  There's a big twist that depends on a relationship from the first movie, and a character I didn't even remember existed.  It didn't really impact my enjoyment of "Gladiator II," except to remind me of the deficiencies of the original movie.  I suspect that the sequel may be a worse film, but I enjoyed it more because Ridley Scott and his collaborators were willing to lean into the spectacle and melodrama more wholeheartedly.  Scott's last few movies had me worried that he was coming to the end of his viability as a commercial filmmaker, but "Gladiator II" shows he still knows how to please an audience.        

 

Now, on to the latest Clint Eastwood film, which some are predicting is the last Clint Eastwood film.  "Juror #2" is a very old fashioned kind of courtroom drama and morality play, with a few scenes that contain direct echoes of "12 Angry Men" and other classics of the genre.  The titular juror is Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), a recovering alcoholic with a very pregnant wife, Ally (Zoe Deutch).  The case involves a woman who was found dead, with all signs pointing to her boyfriend as the perpetrator.  Justin comes to believe that he may have actually killed the woman in a hit-and-run, and his guilt drives him to influence the jury to find the suspect innocent.  Supporting characters include the district attorney (Toni Collette), the public defender (Chris Messina), the judge (Amy Aquino), and a juror who turns out to be an ex-police detective (J.K. Simmons).

"Juror #2" is very no-frills and matter-of-fact, with some good performances and decent enough writing for a legal thriller.  The filmmaking is sparse, as it usually is in Eastwood films, and though the editing is a little jarring for my taste, there are no major unforced errors.  The case and the way that events unfold are preposterous, but we see far worse procedural and legal mistakes every night on network television.  "Juror #2" is not about law or justice, but about putting the viewer in the shoes of a man facing an awful ethical dilemma, and getting them to empathize and relate, and it does that pretty well.  There have been a couple of attempts over the years to turn Nicholas Hoult into a leading man, and he's clearly got the acting chops for it.  However, I think he's a character actor at heart, and "Juror #2" benefits from that.  The movie is small, but sturdy, and a better swan song for Clint Eastwood than any of his films from the past decade.  

   

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