The Five Spot: I Love The Warrior Rhino

Also in this week's edition: A LEGO heist update, a potential American Vandal return, and a story about Henry Winkler and weed and the FBI

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The whole thing is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go…

FIVE: Look at this guy

Do we need a sequel to Gladiator, one that comes out almost a quarter century after the first and brings back neither of the big-name stars and focuses on the now-adult little boy from the original? I mean, I don’t know. Do we need anything, really, besides food and shelter and water and maybe a few people in our lives who can tolerate us enough to hang around? Lord knows I didn’t need a dish of fancy ice cream the other day when I was buzzing around an outdoor shopping center. It sure was good, though. I’ll be honest. I kind of forgot where I was going with this. I’m thinking about the ice cream again. I got red raspberry. It was delicious.

Anyway, Gladiator II. Which they really should have called GladIIator. That’s the trailer for it up there. It dropped earlier this week. And here’s the official plot description.

Over two decades after the original events of Gladiator, Lucius—the grandson of Rome's former emperor Marcus Aurelius and son of Lucilla—lives with his wife and child in Numidia. Roman soldiers led by general Marcus Acacius invade, forcing Lucius into slavery. Inspired by the story of Maximus, as depicted in the original 2000 film, Lucius resolves to fight as a gladiator while opposing the rule of the young emperors Caracalla and Geta.

Cool. Great. The trailer is pretty good, too, as far as trailers go. It’s even got Denzel — Denzel is in Gladiator II, by the way — doing his little Training Day giggle, which is a nice addition to any movie. Imagine how thrilling it would be if you were out with him at dinner and said something that made him do that. I would ride that high straight through to my deathbed. It’s a good giggle. That’s my point. I might make it my text alert for a while.

But I’ve gone and buried the lede here, below a blockquote and a ramble about ice cream. The most important thing about this trailer is thGUYS LOOK AT THE WARRIOR RHINOCEROS.

Yup, I’m in. I’m in on the whole thing now. It turns out all it takes for me to flop over and buy into a sequel that stretches the boundaries of time and good sense is a man entering an arena for battle while standing on the back of a rhinoceros that has been outfitted with armor. I love this guy. The rhino, not the guy on his back. Although that guy seems to have things figured out pretty well, too, at least in this still image. It gets rough for him pretty quickly, though. Maybe instead of fighting gladiators in the Colosseum, he should have just ridden his warrior rhino to the fancy ice cream place I was at the other day.

How much ice cream do you think a warrior rhinoceros could eat? I bet at least three gallons. This has been an excellent discussion about the upcoming Gladiator sequel.

FOUR: Congratulations to Kevin Bacon