Texan Simone Biles, known throughout the world as the GOAT, history’s top gymnast, a passionate defender of women, and champion of mental health, now has a new title: fiancée.
Biles and her boyfriend, Houston Texans safety Jonathan Owens, announced their engagement on February 15 on dual Instagram posts. He apparently popped the question on Valentine’s Day.
“THE EASIEST YES,” Biles exclaimed to her partner. “I can’t wait to spend forever and ever with you, you’re everything I dreamed of and more! let’s get married FIANCÉ.”
Owens shared on his IG: “Woke up this morning with a fiancée,” and to his future wife: “ready for forever with you.” Kudos to Owens, as it was clearly a surprise proposal: “she really had no clue what was coming,” he noted on IG.
Photos of the couple show Owens in a suit on bended knee, while a gleeful Biles, decked out in a black dress, beams at the ring. She then jumps into his arms in a picturesque gazebo. The couple also share a kiss, holding champagne glasses, and a video reveals the dazzling ring. Biles and Owens had been vacationing in Las Vegas.
TMZ reports that celebrity jeweler Zo Frost made the ring, and that Owens handpicked the diamond. "He wanted to add a special touch to the ring by adding a halo around the oval diamond," Zo Frost told TMZ. "The center stone is a 3 carat oval diamond with F color and VVS2 clarity."
Biles and Owens have been inseparable and supportive of each others’ athletic endeavors since they started dating two years ago and became a Texas sports power couple.
There are some films for which making a sequel is natural, and others where a follow-up is wholly unnecessary. Gladiator, which made both tons of money and was named Best Picture at the Oscars, told an impactful stand-alone story that ended with the protagonist dead and no real loose ends. And yet because there’s always more money to be made, here we are 24 years later with Gladiator II.
The lead character this time around is Lucius (Paul Mescal), a general in a North African army who becomes a prisoner of war when the Roman army led by Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) bests him and his troops in battle. Taken back to Rome, he is put in the pool of captured men forced to fight at the Colosseum for the amusement of twin emperors Geta (Joseph Quinn) and Caracella (Fred Hechinger).
Lucius is controlled by Macrinus (Denzel Washington), an ambitious schemer who bets liberally on his prized fighter and always has an eye to move up in the world. Meanwhile, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), the sister of Emperor Commodus from the first film, is now married to Marcus Acacius and has a unique connection with Lucius that is fairly obvious from the get-go.
Directed once again by Ridley Scott and written by David Scarpa, the film commits a number of sins throughout its 150-minute running time, the most blatant of which is that, aside from a few embellishments, it essentially tells the same story as the first film. Lucius, like Maximus, is a deposed military leader who’s out for revenge on the person who killed his family. Instead of one obnoxious emperor, there are now two. And the only way for Lucius to earn his freedom is to fight his way out.
Stories told in the same world can echo each other and, if done well, overcome those similarities. But Gladiator II is shockingly boring for a purported sword-and-sandals epic. Scott and his team try to introduce new elements to the fights, like a gladiator riding a rhinoceros or a ship battle inside the Colosseum (with sharks!), but most of the sequences are inert with no propulsion to them.
The action fails because none of the relationships in the film amount to much. There are stand-out characters like Macrinus and the twin emperors, but instead of creating antipathy or strong feelings of triumph or defeat, the story just kind of happens without any sense of excitement or importance. Much of that issue lies at the feet of Lucius, who simply doesn’t inspire in the same way that Russell Crowe’s Maximus did.
Mescal is a fine actor who’s done good work in more intimate roles, but he’s not up to the task of being an action star, at least not in this film. Any bombast he shows with the character feels forced, and the story doesn’t give him enough opportunities to counteract that lack. Washington, however, fills up the screen with his charisma, and it’s during his scenes that the film comes closest to being rousing. Quinn and Hechinger are a lot of fun as the twin emperors, but in the end they feel like retreads of Joaquin Phoenix from the original.
Any sequel should have a purpose that sets it apart from what came before, but Scott, Scarpa, and the rest of their team fail in that respect in Gladiator II. It’s a mostly lifeless film that delivers scenes that would be exciting if they had any kind of good story to back them up.
