From Kevin Maher’s London Times review:
“Paul Mescal’s Lucius character is shaky at best, and the versatile actor, but for a couple of dazzling close-ups (very Richard Harris in Camelot), consistently struggles to enliven the gig — he frequently puts the ‘meh’ into Mescal.”
From Owen Gleiberman‘s Gladiator II review, posted on 11.11 at 6 am:
“The whole film is tailored to the next-generation specifications of its star, Paul Mescal, who plays a descendant of Russell Crowe’s Maximus and does it by not trying to imitate Crowe’s performance. In Gladiator, Crowe, wielding a sword that was like an extension of his inner hostility, was the ultimate thinking person’s badass. Mescal, svelte and placid, comes on more like the disheveled son of Marlon Brando — a forlorn pussycat turned rager.
“Mescal doesn’t have anything approaching [Crowe’s] elemental masculine gravitas. His Lucius, who is captured and brought to Rome to be a gladiator, is sulky and pensive, with a quizzical look. His stare is sensitive, his grin rueful, his lower jaw juts. But Mescal has something that works for the movie –he projects not revenge but a shaggy rugged nobility, the idealism that will make Lucius the potential savior of Rome.”
Little White Lies‘ Hannah Strong:
“The normally reliable Mescal is a pale imitation of Crowe, although it’s down to the uninspired script rather than his acting — Lucius has little emotional range beyond rage, and while this works to grand effect in the early gladiator battle between Lucius and a bunch of bloodthirsty baboons, the wind goes out of his sails quickly.”
“The Irish actor, a usually intriguing presence, doesn’t hold the screen here so much as he vanishes into its tumult. Of all the ways in which Mescal feels miscast, the most fatal may be his utter inability to seem like someone other guys would follow to their deaths. Mescal [is] terrible at giving the rousing speeches that were so iconic in Gladiator and that Gladiator II, which has a clunkier script written by David Scarpa, attempts to re-create.
“Mescal’s instinct is to underplay these moments rather than bellow theatrically, which is a problem, especially when saddled with somewhat confusing slogans like ‘Where we are, death is not!'”
