It’s Denzel Washington’s Empire and We’re All Just Living in It

There’s not a more menacing or imposing smile in the movies than Denzel Washington’s, which is funny, because his grin is nevertheless the brightest, broadest, most handsome smile you’ve ever seen—at least in interviews, when he’s not in character as a vengeful ex-Marine or crooked cop. This smile is sometimes righteous, sometimes vicious, and almost always a sign of some immensely gratifying comeuppance. In so many roles, time and again, Washington stops in his tracks, cocks his head, and flashes those pearly whites in a manner of saying: you just fucked up.

Denzel Washington smiles at a lot of people, slaves and emperors alike, in Gladiator II.

Ridley Scott’s sequel to the original Gladiator (released when I was in middle school, if you can believe it …) sees Rome slipping further into terminal collapse. Here, Washington plays Macrinus, a savvy gladiator proprietor and arms dealer who inches treacherously close to the ultimate seat of power. You see, Macrinus loves games. Early on, he recruits the enslaved Numidian soldier Lucius—our bitter hero, played by Paul Mescal—to fight for him in a highly hyped and hilariously overproduced series of battles in the arena. (Who knew the Colosseum could comfortably stage a naval battle involving live sharks?) Macrinus sees in Lucius a certain invaluable rage, and so he keeps his champion engaged by promising him an opportunity to slay his conqueror, Acacius, the disillusioned general played by Pedro Pascal. Like I said, Macrinus loves games: He tempts everyone who crosses his path with the promise of something they so desperately want. They just have to be prepared to risk everything else to get it.

Macrinus is a master of essential talents in this sweetly scented but politically rotten high society: glad-handing, back-patting, favor-trading, and so on. He’s initially somewhat hard to read; he’s clearly being set up to be the movie’s villain, but how bad is he, really, compared to the jokers and tyrants who rank above him? He respects Lucius, an enslaved man, no more or less than he respects anyone else in his orbit, including the twin emperors, Geta and Caracalla, whose idiocy is neatly summarized by an article revealing that their shared portrayal was largely inspired by Beavis and Butt-Head. There was always, in retrospect, a Macrinus-shaped hole in this vision of Rome. In Gladiator, Commodus is a weak-hearted strongman, a foundering failson with childish insecurities and half-assed theories of autocratic governance. In Gladiator II, Geta and Caracalla are so unserious as to be the source of comic relief, though they are at least dramatically striking avatars of the sickening excess and dysfunction of Imperial Rome. (“Don’t fall for it. This city is diseased,” Lucius tells a fellow captive marveling at its grandeur from the outskirts.) Macrinus, who was once enslaved himself, is refreshing for his coolness and clarity in his outlook on power: He wants it for its own sake, to use it to ruin Rome, or at least de-sentimentalize it, firmly extinguishing any lingering naivety about democracy, equality, all that jazz. In everything, Macrinus sees the Colosseum. That’s Rome, he tells Lucius. Take it (by force, of course) or leave it.

On a spiritual level—not to muddy the mythological waters here—Washington plays Macrinus as a sort of Lucifer. He’s a cunning man in prideful, spiteful rebellion against the golden empire. Though loosely based on a real emperor, Washington’s Macrinus is otherworldly in a way that to my mind supported the actor’s slightly controversial decision to speak in his familiar Bronx-born accent instead of standard Period Drama English. Washington’s Macrinus is this incarnate malevolence who exists outside of time and context. He’s karma. He’s vengeance. He’s a whole style of being that only Denzel Washington, with his particular timbre and slickness, can pull off. Just listen when he says to the impoverished and sniveling Senator Thraex, I own your house. As always, Washington has delivered a series of indelible reads and eerie exchanges, like only he can.

Lucius is eventually revealed to be the prodigal grandson of Marcus Aurelius, as (rather ahistorically) depicted in the previous movie. Initially determined to slay Acacius in revenge for the conquest that killed his wife and landed him and his fellow soldiers in captivity, Lucius instead becomes intent on taking his place as the rightful heir to Marcus Aurelius. Unfortunately, Macrinus is resolved to moot the whole question of favored bloodlines by kill-streaking his way to the front of the imperial succession, which runs through Geta and Caracalla, then Lucius’s mother, Lucilla (with Connie Nielsen reprising this role from the original). Denzel Washington ultimately smiles upon them all.

Washington excels despite everything else in Gladiator II: He ruthlessly cuts through the bullshit of the rest of the movie, with its CGI sharks and its regrettably weak lead. This sequel is so disappointingly redundant, repeating the themes that were hashed out in the previous movie: the proto-democratic ideals of the earlier Roman Republic, the corruption of power, the weakness of strongmen, etc. The story is similarly uninspired; Paul Mescal’s Lucius retraces the role of Russell Crowe’s Maximus, but a lot less capably, with Lucius inheriting Maximus’s arms and armor for the final battle with Macrinus and his Praetorian Guard. Ultimately, Macrinus is the only novel aspect of Gladiator II, and Denzel Washington dials that novelty up to the max. He’s an irresistible force, deforming everything in his path, getting you anxiously wondering who or what could possibly stop this motherfucker. It culminates in a man-to-man sword fight, of course—a confrontation too open and direct and ad hoc for Macrinus to cleverly exploit to his advantage. In his final showdown with Lucius, with two dumbstruck armies bearing witness, Macrinus doesn’t die so much as vanish, as an exorcized demon would, dissolved into a rocky stream, leaving only vast, bewildered silence. Here, filling this silence, Lucius gives his big speech about the precious ideals of Republican Rome. That’s all well and good, I suppose, but at that point, I’m already reminiscing about the bad times, when the bad man spoke so iconically on so many occasions, reveling in the elegant success of his promotion schemes as he stabbed Caracalla, shot Lucilla, and very nearly pulled it all off. As he so memorably told one clueless senator: That’s politicssssssss.