Producers: Todd Komarnicki, Emmanuel Kampouris, Camille Kampouris, Ralph Winter, Mark O’Sullivan, Chloe Kassis-Crowe and John Bennett Scanlon   Director: Todd Komarnicki   Screenplay: Todd Komarnicki   Cast: Jonas Dassler, August Diehl, David Jonsson, Flula Borg, Moritz Bleibtreu, Nadine Heidenreich, Greg Kolpakchi, William Robinson, Clarke Peters, Patrick Mölleken, James Flynn and Phileas Heyblom    Distributor: Angel Studios

Grade: C

It would be gratifying to write that Todd Komarnicki’s biographical film on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran minister who was such a committed opponent of Nazism that he was executed for involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler, was worthy of him.  Unfortunately, it’s not.  “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin” is earnest and strenuously edifying, but also stolid, simplistic and chronologically fractured, not nearly as nuanced a portrait as its subject deserves.

The film begins with a prologue set in 1914, with young Dietrich (Phileas Heyblom) playing around the family’s country home with his older brother Walter (Patrick Mölleken).  But Walter is called away to serve in the German army during the Great War and is killed in battle, leaving the boy, along with his parents Karl (Moritz Bleibtreu) and Paula (Nadine Heidenreich) heartbroken.  It then moves rather quickly to show the 39-year old Lutheran pastor (Jonas Dassler) in a concentration camp awaiting execution by hanging only weeks before the German surrender will end World War II in Europe.

Reversing the temporal course, the narrative turns to the young man’s sojourn at New York’s Union Theological Seminary in 1930-31, during which he finds the official instruction laughable but is engaged by his introduction to African-American religion and culture by classmate Frank Fisher (David Jonsson), who takes him to a Harlem jazz club (where he melds his playing of a prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier into an ensemble performance) and to the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where the emotional pull of the preaching of Adam Clayton Powell Sr. (Clarke Peters) makes the wide-eyed student aware of the sterility of traditional German practice.  Fisher also makes a naïve Bonhoeffer aware of the depths of racial prejudice in America, a lesson he takes back with him when he witnesses the rise of Nazi anti-Jewish policy.

That leads him to oppose the established hierarchy’s acquiescence to the nationalization of the German Lutheran Church, complete with lionization of Hitler in a rewritten Bible, after his return to Germany in the thirties.  The film depicts him as a leading voice in the formation of the dissident Confessing Church opposed to the officially sanctioned one, even agreeing to serve as rector of an underground seminary for it, where he meets the student, Eberhard Bethge (William Robinson), who will become not only a friend and confidant but, as an author, the keeper of his memory. 

It also shows his work in England not only in enlisting support for that effort, but in spreading word of the dangers posed by the regime.  This aspect of the script emphasizes Bonhoeffer’s relationship with fellow pastor Martin Niemöller (August Diehl), who initially argued that the Nazification of the church was a tolerable aberration but came to see it as an existential danger.  (For dramatic effect Komarnicki repurposes Niemöller’s famous postwar “First they came for” formulation to a sermon he preaches to his congregation, ruffling the feathers of soldiers in attendance.)

Hovering over all this earlier material is the reality of Bonhoeffer’s fate after he became involved in helping to spirit Jews across the border to Switzerland and contributing to the resistance movement within the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency, in which his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnányi (Flula Borg) was a major activist, and which culminated in several failed plots to kill Hitler.  The degree of his actual participation in these endeavors is a matter of debate—he certainly acted as a courier, but whether it went any further is unclear; Komarnicki certainly stretches speculation about his direct involvement as far as he can for dramatic purposes.

In the process, unfortunately, the writer-director fails to illustrate the complexity of Bonhoeffer’s Chistocentric view of the individual believer’s life and how it related to the tension he felt between his pacifism and activism in the face of evil; these are issues that as a philosopher-theologian Bonhoeffer grappled with to the very end, and the film deals with them only in a relatively superficial fashion, portraying his final decisions in a fairly obvious, even simplistic way.  Of course it’s asking a lot of a film to expect it to convey the intricacies in the internal debate of a man so committed to working through fundamental moral issues.  But while his external actions are hardly insignificant, the workings of his mind are what really make Bonhoeffer fascinating.

In that respect while it may be dramatically satisfying to watch Bonhoeffer interacting with a conflicted German officer (Greg Kolpakchi) in the camp where he’s executed, perhaps the most telling episode is actually his conversation with Sigmund Rascher (James Flynn), an SS doctor who’d engaged in experiments as heinous as Mengele’s but been arrested for insulting Hitler.  Their sparring, which pits the theologian desperate for certainty in his faith against the jabs of an amoral cynic, at least gets at the continuing struggle that marked Bonhoeffer’s life.

But if Komarnicki’s film falls short in conveying the richness of Bonhoeffer’s thought, it provides a depiction of his courage that many will find satisfying from a purely emotional perspective.  And if Dassler’s performance matches Komarnicki’s approach in its bluntness, and the other performances are solid without being outstanding, they all get by.  (A couple of caveats: Tim Hudson does one of the weakest impressions of Winston Churchill ever, and Marc Bessant’s Hitler is even worse: fortunately, both appear very briefly.)

 On the technical side, one has to admire the look the behind-the-camera team—production designer John Beard, costumer Chouchanne Abello-Tcherpachian, cinematographer John Mathieson—have achieved on what was probably a limited budget, and the score by Antonio Pinto and Gabriel Ferreira is suitably morose.  But Komarnicki’s pacing is ploddingly reverential, a quality exacerbated by Blu Murray’s slack editing.                                    

One must also note that the film has engendered controversy, with descendants of Bonhoeffer and scholars of his work criticizing it for presenting Bonhoeffer’s life in a fashion that has allowed it to be embraced by Christian nationalists and authoritarians.  Though taken on its own it doesn’t come across as polemical in that regard, some aspects of the advertising campaign and the fact that the distributor adopted its subtitle from the popular 2010 biography of Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, a strident right-wing political activist, can certainly be cited in support of the claim. 

Whether or not you view it as propagandistic in that respect, however, the film’s flaws from a purely cinematic perspective are serious enough that those wishing to learn about Bonhoeffer might do better to seek out Martin Doblmeier’s solid 2003 documentary on him instead.

Producers: Douglas Wick, Ridley Scott, Lucy Fisher, Michael Pruss and David Franzoni  Director: Ridley Scott   Screenplay: David Scarpa   Cast: Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger, Lior Raz, Derek Jacobi, Connie Nielsen, Denzel Washington. Peter Mensah, Matt Lucas, Alexander Karim, Rory McCann, Tim McInnerny, Alec Utgoff, Yuval Gonen and Alfie Tempest    Distributor: Paramount

Grade: C

The history is hooey in Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II,” but that didn’t stop the original from becoming a smash in 2000 and an enduring favorite for many, so it shouldn’t impede this long-awaited sequel’s chances for success.  What might, however, is that it lacks its predecessor’s emotional core, as well as an equally memorable lead character—elements one is reminded of in the opening credits, which replay the first film’s plot in lovely pastel-colored drawings.

The script by David Scarpa, who previously worked with Scott on “Napoleon” and “All the Money in the World,” begins in the early third century, some two decades after the events of the original (which closed around 193), with an attack on Numidia, apparently a kingdom (rather than the Roman province it actually was) ruled by brawny chieftain Jugurtha (Peter Mensah), by a fleet led by the Roman general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal).  Among its defenders are rugged Hano (Paul Mescal) and his wife Arishat (Yuval Gonen), a master archer.  In the ensuing battle—the first of many lengthy set-pieces expertly staged by Scott along with cinematographer John Mathieson, editors Claire Simpson and Sam Restivo, production designer Arthur Max, costumers Janty Yates and Dave Crossman, the stunt team and the effects contingent supervised by Neil Corbould and Mark Bakowski, all to the accompaniment of Harry Gregson-Williams’ typically thunderous score—Arishat is killed and Hano taken prisoner.

Hano comes to the attention of Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a wily, flamboyant owner of gladiators and arms merchant, who, along with his chief trainer Vigo (Lior Raz), sees the captive as a prime candidate for stardom in the arena.  He quickly wows the crowd in the Colosseum, enriching Macrinus, who worms his way into the confidence of fraternal emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), both gilded and effete, though Caracalla is the weirder of the two, devoted as he is to his pet monkey.

Hano’s popularity with the fickle mob grows not only because of his dominance over human opponents, but his success against animal ones—first bloodthirsty baboons, then a swordsman riding a rhinoceros, and finally sharks, in a sequence in which the amphitheater is flooded to allow for a pretend naval battle.  (All the critters are of only middle-grade CGI, but modern viewers will probably cheer on the elaborate set-pieces as lustily as the Colosseum thousands do.  Monkeys and rhinos and sharks, oh my!)

But the most devoted of the onlookers is no doubt Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, one of the few returnees from the original), the daughter of Emperor Marcus Aurelius who’d been the lover of the first film’s General Maximus (Russell Crowe), and had a son by him before her brother Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) turned against the general, leading to Maximus’ enslavement, his gladiatorial career and, ultimately, his climactic duel with Commodus.  She’d sent the boy away to protect him, and then married Acacius.  Now she recognizes Hano as her long-lost son, Lucius Verus.

But Hano/Lucius hates Acacius, whom he holds responsible for Arishat’s death, and wants to destroy him.  What he doesn’t know is that Acacius and Lucilla are leading an effort to overthrow the emperors, who are leading the state to ruin.  Nor is he aware of the true purposes of Macrinus, who is using him, and the wealth he brings through his victories, to fulfill his own grandiose ambitions.  Though there are necessarily narrative twists and turns, it’s inevitable that Hano/Lucius will ultimately take up the mantle left by his father to Make Rome Great Again.  That will require heroic sacrifice, reconciliations, and, of course, lots of bloodshed.

Apart from the fact that the historical background is a complete mess—the period is generally correct, and some names reflect actual personages from it, even if they’re assigned to utterly fictional characters—“Gladiator II” is a fairly exciting bit of hokum in the mold of its predecessor or earlier Roman epics.  But Mescal, for all the praise his recent work has gotten, doesn’t possess the charisma that Crowe exuded; he certainly passes muster physically and manages the arena fights well (although the CGI is often annoyingly over-the-top), but never makes the character come into focus.  In fact, Pascal brings the conflicted Acacius more emotionally alive.  But the real star of the proceedings is Washington, whose Macrinus is a deliciously malevolent manipulator.  It’s a wildly extravagant performance, but its flamboyance makes him the Phoenix of the sequel. 

By contrast Quinn and Hechinger do standard-issue swishing shtick as Geta and Caracalla, who in actuality ruled jointly, and with mutual hatred, only briefly in 211, though the latter has fun with the monkey business.  Of the others in the large cast, Tim McInnerny is noteworthy as a scheming senator, even as Derek Jacobi, like Nielsen one of the few returnees from the previous movie, is virtually anonymous as another.  Nielsen plays the sorrowing mother and concerned wife decently but makes less of an impression than one might expect.  That criticism doesn’t apply to Matt Lucas, in his small role as the Colosseum event announcer.        

With “Gladiator II” Scott strives mightily to recapture the magic that the 2000 movie created for so many people, but falls short, despite one spectacular performance.

Incidentally, the movie ends on a triumphantly hopeful note that, in view of the actual history, is utterly bonkers.  The emperor who came to the throne after Caracalla (and his assassin) was Elagabalus, who was truly exceptional in his supposed depravity.  Yet he’s never been the subject of a film.  Now there’s somebody an adventurous filmmaker might take on, though the result might rival Tinto Brass’s notorious “Caligula.”