Review – Gladiator 2

What happened to Ridley Scott? He used to be really good at storytelling. But this grandiose flop is anything but. It’s fidgety, moving from one brief, unrelated scene to the next with the attention span of a pre-teen child living on a diet of Pop Tarts and Pepsi. Fans of actual Roman history will find this particularly hard to follow; the plot ostensibly includes historical figures and yet the movie intersects with reality only by coincidence. I was particularly taken with the part where Caracalla makes his pet monkey and the bad guy co-consuls. After the emperor and the villain are both slain (spoiler alert, to the extent that’s a spoiler), shouldn’t that make the monkey the next monarch? Actually, Gladiator 3: Monkey Emperor might well prove to be a better outing. See if desperate