This review contains spoilers for the film Gladiator II.

My dad tried naming me Maximus.

It was February of 2001 – the Towers had not yet fallen, Jennifer Lopez’s second studio album was charting, and Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sandals epic Gladiator was on everyone’s minds. The movie would later win five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor, for Russell Crowe’s performance as the titular gladiator, Maximus Decimus Meridius.

Like Ralph Cifaretto in The Sopranos, my father’s love for the movie ran deep. Deep enough that as his first-born son, fresh from the womb, lay squirming in my tired mother’s arms, he thought, “Why not Maximus? We could call him Max, for short.”

Obviously, this was struck down by my mother, and here I am 23 years later with a Jewish-ish moniker and no funny story to tell whenever I introduce myself. “Remember the movie?” I might be saying, had it not been for my mom’s insistence on a Traditional Family Name for her first son. “Remember Joaquin Phoenix? And the MF DOOM helmet? You’ve seen it, right?”

My dad wanted to name me Maximus, the movie snapped up five Oscars and almost 500 million dollars worldwide – these things are testament to the staying power of the original. Peak Physique Russell Crowe kicks ass, Joaquin Phoenix is suitably slimy and disturbing as the incestuous Commodus, Oliver Reed grumbles his way through a stellar (final) performance as a gladiator trainer – it all works wonderfully. Strength and honor and all that.

When I saw the trailer for Gladiator II, the one with Jay-Z and Kanye’s “No Church in the Wild” cut over rhino fights and trireme battles in a flooded Colosseum, where Denzel Washington kind of leers and sneers and makes absolutely no attempt at an (admittedly equally anachronistic) British accent in favor of his trademark “You motherfuckers’ll be playing basketball in Pelican Bay when I get finished with you!” tough guy voice – what I’m saying is, it looked really cool, and I hoped, in my heart of hearts, that Ridley Scott could stick the landing, and not fuck up the legacy and near-perfect ending of the original.

It sort of worked.

Let’s clarify here – Gladiator II never fully gets out of the shadow of the first movie – a tough ask, considering the stacked cast and lean script that Scott was working with in 2000. But, as a Thanksgiving break flick about political upheaval and last-days-of-Rome decadence, combined with some fun arena fight scenes and a couple of standout performances, Gladiator II does decently well for itself.

Beginning with the good: Normal People’s Paul Mescal does pretty well as Lucius, a captured Numidian-turned-gladiator. Mescal brings a certain “who-cares” physicality to his fight scenes – less classically inspired than Crowe, more animalistic and brutal. Mescal’s arc, as a captured slave from a Roman raid on his home city, echoes Crowe’s fall and rise from general to slave to gladiator in the first movie (with a twist in II that I won’t ruin here.)

Denzel Washington, playing Macrinus the slavemaster who acquires Lucius and puts him to work training as a gladiator, is really fantastic. He chews scenery, slips through scenes with a greasy impunity, and is always around to whisper, sibilantly, in a royal ear. He takes much more of a central role in the movie in the second and third acts, culminating in a (not to beat the Training Day drum too much) fight scene with Mescal reminiscent of the final showdown with Ethan Hawke at the end of Antoine Fuqua’s cop drama.

Gladiator II is his second collaboration with Ridley Scott, after 2007’s American Gangster. Historical accuracy of his questionable accent be damned (though, to be fair, I don’t think ancient Romans talked with a London-esque regional flair) Denzel fills a particular niche in this movie that I doubt any other actor could really replicate.

Strangely enough, Matt Lucas, the alopecic British comedian, does a weirdly compelling job as the Colosseum’s public address announcer. I found myself drawing comparisons between him and a similar character from the second Mad Max movie, who acts as a post-apocalyptic warlord’s herald. Lucas plays one of those roles that makes you wish Scott had leaned a little more into his weirdo side that he’s eminently capable of tapping into.

Continuing on to the serviceable – Pedro Pascal and Connie Nielsen are just alright in this, with Nielsen reprising her role from the first film. Pascal never elevates his performance as General Acacius, commander of the Roman Army, over a kind of flattened out reaction reel. Pascal, to his credit, makes the best he can out of a semi-boring character, and he does very will with his Colosseum fight scene, but you’re never exactly demanding that he get back on screen.

Nielsen is in a similar boat – her performance borders, at times, on the obnoxiously dramatic. She (along with Derek Jacobi playing Senator Gracchus) is the only one reprising her role from the original, so there’s a certain amount of pressure on her to bridge the gap, in some way, between Gladiator and its sequel. Whether she pulls this off is up to the viewer – personally, I’m leaning against it.

The visual effects, similarly, are acceptable. Scott’s obvious reliance on CGI has a certain crippling effect on the movie, especially considering the preponderance of practical effects in the first film. Certain, smaller scenes look better – some of the initial fight scenes when Mescal is learning to be a gladiator are interspersed with CGI baboons and rhinos, and those look pretty good, for the most part. However, larger battle scenes, like the initial invasion of Lucius’s city by the Romans, where a fleet of computer generated triremes stretches to a computer generated horizon, looked – well, computer generated. And the less said about the CGI Colosseum sharks, the better.

Finally – the bad. Psychotic emperors Geta and Caracalla, played by Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger respectively, lack any real kind of compelling craziness that animated Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus. They serve as the Beavis and Butt-Head of a corrupted Rome, and not much else. Again, this is where the sequel fails to properly extricate itself from the long shadow cast by the original – Phoenix’s performance as an incestuous, power-mad emperor Commodus was such an integral part of the first film, serving as a worthy foil to Crowe’s protagonist, that to split that character up into two (maybe even three, counting Denzel’s Macrinus) is profoundly lazy writing.

Another glaring issue is Scott’s insistence that Rome is supposed to be some egalitarian, multiethnic nation state – a shining city on a hill for all the downtrodden to come and live. It’s this anachronistic, retroactive Americanization of Rome as a concept, and for some reason, it motivates the last third of the movie. Audiences need their politics spoon fed to them, of course, but this just felt insulting. It’s Rome – not Berkeley.

Overall, Gladiator II is not bad. I gave it 3.5 stars out of 5, if you must know. It certainly suffers from some mediocre performances, and some less-than-adequate CGI, but overall, it was fun to watch on the big screen. Strength and honor, and a big-ass dude on a rhino cleaving you in twain with a battle-ax.

Jacob Hersh is studying law at the University of Idaho. He occasionally does movie reviews and writes weird columns for the Landmine to get extra money for beer.