'Spartacus:
Vengeance,' over-cooked
Second season of the Starz drama heaps on the sex and violence
By Tom Conroy
Jan 26, 2012
In its second official season, Starz’s drama “Spartacus” is finally getting to the heart of its subject. The title gladiator is assembling his army of freed slaves while weighing whether his cause is worth the risk and confronting the burden of taking responsibility for the lives of others.
And most viewers will be saying, “Yeah, yeah, let’s get back to the gratuitous sex and violence.”
To paraphrase an old saying, those who live by the sword and soft-core porn will die by them. Even though its story is becoming graver and grander, the series’ prurience and bloodthirstiness completely overwhelm any ambitions toward serious drama. People looking for “300”-style gore, plentiful nudity and twisted sexuality will be satisfied. Those of us who like a little character and plot development will be frustrated.
Kicking off this Friday, Jan. 27, at 10 p.m., the second season, officially titled “Spartacus: Vengeance,” picks up after the gladiators have freed themselves from Batiatus’ gladiator school in a bloody revolt that left Batiatus’ wife, Lucretia (Lucy Lawless), barely alive. Led by Spartacus (Liam McIntyre, replacing the late Andy Whitfield), the gladiators are terrorizing the Roman citizens around Capua.
Glaber (Craig Parker), the patrician whose betrayal of Spartacus led to his enslavement, is dispatched from Rome to apprehend the fugitives. He and his socially ambitious and sexually voracious wife, Ilithyia (Viva Bianca), get caught up again in Capuan politics, which are complicated when Lucretia’s survival is interpreted by the populace as a sign of favor from the gods.
As in the first season and in the short prequel season that intervened when Whitfield’s illness delayed the shooting of this season, the Romans entertain themselves in improbable ways. Besides using their servants to help kick-start and finish off intimate moments, they have naked people simulate sex during their banquets. When they go to houses of prostitution, they choose to perform out in the open.
We’re meant to believe that as entertainment at a banquet, well-born men and women will draw lots and take turns mutilating a captured slave. Apparently in this society, it’s a faux pas if a young patrician woman hesitates to stab a bound man whose eyes are pleading for mercy.
The 1960 Kirk Douglas movie “Spartacus,” which despite its hokiness still casts a long shadow on this show, at least provided us some relief from Roman decadence with scenes of the simple virtuous life of the escaped slaves. In this telling, the gladiators are generally brutish, and many of their women are scheming tramps.
The escaped slaves aren’t the band of brothers portrayed in the Douglas film. The Gauls are loyal to Crixus (Manu Bennett), who wants only to find the love of his life, Naevia (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), whom Batiatus sent off before the revolt.
Liam McIntyre, although youthfully handsome, has a lack of charisma that makes it plausible that he would have a hard time rallying his troops. Occasionally, part of a scene requires him to address questions of loyalty or justice or the greater good. He screws his features a little tighter to show his inner struggle, but the show quickly reverts to the baring or hacking of body parts, so we never learn whether McIntyre could handle more strenuous acting work. (Since Whitfield played the character so straight up the middle, the change of actors isn’t jarring.)
As in the previous seasons, the violence could best be described as unimaginable were it not for the fact that someone must have imagined it or we wouldn’t be seeing it. Blood and body parts fly toward the screen, and the business ends of swords and spears continue to find new body parts from which to sprout.
With the notable exception of Lucy Lawless, who gets to play the Hamlet game of making us guess exactly how mentally disturbed she is, most of the actors overact furiously. They’re saddled with odd dialogue that combines copious amounts of modern obscenity with a fake archaism that mainly involves dropping possessives and articles.
When Spartacus is discussing with his girlfriend, Mira (Katrina Law), how his heart is dead, he says, “Place ear to chest and you will find it absent sound.”
Since the show’s creators must be hoping to drag this story out for as many seasons as possible, the plot develops glacially. At the end of the four episodes that Starz made available for review, the slave army is still far from assembled. Even though the former gladiators have killed plenty of Roman soldiers, they haven’t realized it would be a good idea to use their armor, preferring instead to keep fighting in their homespun Speedos.
To avoid spoilers, we’ll have to limit ourselves to saying that various characters are pursuing love or revenge, but they spend a lot of time spinning their wheels. In the most extreme example of padding, we get an “origin story” for Oenomaus, a.k.a. Doctore (Peter Mensah).
For viewers who have already adopted “Spartacus” as a guilty pleasure, this season will be just as pleasurable as the first. If they ever forget that they should be feeling guilt too, this society is in trouble.
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