Long before “thinking of the Roman Empire” became shorthand because he had a hyper-fixation, Ridley Scott turned the current Roman empire into a mainstream obsession. In 2000, the director’s blockbuster sword and sandals Gladiator worked its way to becoming the second-highest-grossing film of that year, before winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and cementing its status as – I’m assuming here – your dad’s favorite movie of all the times. “Aren’t you having fun?!” Russell Crowe’s Maximus fired up the crowd in a memorably rousing scene. I really was: Here is an almost absurdly simple tale of revenge that Scott, through visceral fight scenes (and real tigers), turned into a maximalist epic.

For Gladiator IInow in theaters, Scott somehow took it a step further. The sequel has twice as many heroes to root for and twice as many emperors to root against, plus a wild card in the form of Denzel Washington’s arms dealer Macrinus. Instead of tigers, arena fights now involve a menagerie of baboons, sharks and a rhinoceros. Even the opening credits were designed to excite the audience: key scenes from the previous film are animated in a pictorial sequence that lands on a title card that stylizes the sequel’s name as, gloriously, GLADIATOR. It’s so grandiose that the audience at my screening started cheering before a single fight started.

Read: Are we having too much fun?

Set 16 years after the events of Gladiatorthe sequel follows Lucius (Paul Mescal), the son of Maximus and Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, reprising her role). Lucilla secretly sent the young Lucius to the kingdom of Numidia for his protection after the death of Maximus. A lot has happened in the intervening years, which we learn through overly ornate flashbacks and exposition. Lucius ended up resenting his homeland and his mother given their time apart. Resentment turns to anger after Roman forces, led by Lucile’s new husband, General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), conquer Numidia in an opening battle that leads to the death of Lucius’ wife. In Rome, meanwhile, a pair of wacky brothers named Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) have become co-emperors. Their reckless leadership inspired a resistance led by Lucilla and Acacius and turned the city into fertile ground for the rise of opportunistic power players like Macrinus.

The plot, filled with so many shadowy conspiracies and cunning characters, is much less straightforward than that of Gladiatorto her detriment. But amid the bloat, Scott knows how the cycle of ambition and revenge can be hard to break. Bloodshed is the cause and effect of every twist in the story, the reason behind Rome’s tumult and the ostensible solution to its woes. Violence demands the spotlight and Gladiator II it draws tension from the fact that many of its characters cannot escape their attraction to brutality. In Scott’s hands, ancient Rome has never been more ruthless—or more exciting to watch.

The director is a master at bringing elegance out of difficult set pieces. During the assault on Lucius’ home, embers swirl like snow, splashes of water and mud slam into the camera lens, and every sword strike or punch lands with primal intensity. Inside the Colosseum, despite the heavy use of CGI, Scott finds stunning images in the chaos: a pool of blood blooms underwater. An arrow zips across the field. A gladiator throws sand into the air. These photographs are fascinating to the viewer and convey the strange allure of combat for the combatants themselves.

These energetic fight scenes are accompanied by a collection of brilliant performances, with those playing the villains stealing the show. Mescal and Pascal embody the gravity of their roles and become almost feral when forced into the Colosseum. But Quinn and Hechinger have much more fun leaning into their characters’ boyish pettiness, echoing Joaquin Phoenix’s work as the man-child emperor Commodus in Gladiator. Washington, however, runs away with the film: armed with a Cheshire cat grin, piles of jewelry and seemingly limitless glasses of wine, Macrinus plays Rome as if it were a massive chessboard full of pawns, and the actor embraces the many diversions of the scenario. . He imbues the character with an infectious joy in every scene, whether he’s cheering on the men slashing each other inside the arena or quietly trying to manipulate Lucius into doing his bidding.

For all the fun it has, Gladiator II it requires a working knowledge of its predecessor’s story to understand the stakes, which also means it amplifies the original film’s flaws. The characters are drawn more thinly, with shallow motivations, despite the contrivances of the plot. The dialogue is choppier, full of observations about the “dream of Rome” in the face of an empire that repeatedly fails to learn its lesson. And the ending brings out the vague idea that Rome’s future rests on the unification of its people – a serious sentiment, perhaps, but a rather boring conclusion to arrive at after two hours of wildness.

then again Gladiator II it does not pretend to offer anything more than pure spectacle. The ending shows the idea that hope is its own form of power, but even Lucius admits its limits as a peacekeeping force. “You expect me to speak,” Lucius says as he addresses the opposing armies about to do battle. “I don’t know what to say.” Perhaps Macrinus, who believes that Rome is doomed to brutality and bloodshed, has a point when he states that violence is the “universal language.” After all, to borrow the words of a revered gladiator, it’s undeniably fun.