No man, woman or fanged baboon steps in the same river twice. Why? Because the water’s not the same – as Seneca might have written had he too watched Sir Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, then Gladiator II nearly a quarter of a century later, instead of living out his days in actual Ancient Rome 2,000 years before.

The water’s different. Don’t go catching the late show in your nearest cinema like I did if you expect to re-experience the winter-soldier thrill of army-on-tribe at the Battle of Vindobona. But do settle down with a bucket of popcorn if a summertime amphibious assault mounted by Roman galleys, worthy of Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy, lights your arrows.

A Gladiator sequel cannot cut it without memorable fights and the baboon encounter is as startling as anything in the original but a simple duel fought waist-high in an actual river may stay with you even longer after the credits have rolled, not least because of its cathartic symbolism compared with a very different scene on the River Styx.

Russell Crowe’s sword is in safe hands with Paul Mescal who only bows here to Denzel Washington as the gladiators’ master with his speech on the death of an emperor which is, well, positively head-turning. When Washington goes in one ear, he does not go out the other.

If there are flaws in the sequel, they may lie in a script unlikely to rest in the mind like Crowe’s great line, “Are you not entertained?” Anything else is probably covered by cinematic licence. The large audience watching with me in the cinema into the early hours of Sunday, most of them young and as diverse a crowd as you’d find, seemed happy to the end.

It’s good to know that in his eighties, Sir Ridley can still exhilarate and transport film-goers with a new film as he did, you imagine, back in the 1970s when he first put “strength and honour” on the screen with The Duellists.