10 Recent Movie Choices That Pissed Off The Fans
8. Gliadiator II - Redoing The First Film, But Worse
Gladiator II, following up a people's classic that never needed a sequel, has proven to be a thoroughly divisive film since its release, with many fans of the original panning it as a poor-quality redo of the original picture's story. Is this warranted? Well, yes and no.
On the one hand, Gladiator II is a comfortably worse film than the original. The characters aren't as strong and the movie does rather go off the rails in the third act, which features anticlimactic action and has Denzel Washington's character, previously the best one in the movie, suddenly transforming into a cartoonish villain.
On the other hand, is Gladiator II really that bad? It is a beautifully made big-screen spectacle with excellent performances all around, and it serves as a nice throwback to the kind of vast historical epics we just don't really get anymore. It's also a pleasingly sincere, serious film, which lands especially well in an era where so many blockbusters go overboard with Marvel-style humour.
At the end of the day, a sequel to such a beloved feature was almost certainly going to fall short for many people. In a few years, it's likely that this will be appreciated for what it really is: not great, not terrible, just a perfectly solid film that isn't too bad for a sequel that had no reason to exist whatsoever.