Reviews

Pompeii 3D - Film review

Posted on: 2014-05-08

It plays more like Braveheart meets Gladiator meets Dante's Peak, plundering other similar, far superior movies and wringing all character empathy or filmic exhilaration from its soulless cinematic gut.

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When it comes to crimes against cinematic humanity, director Paul W.S. Anderson has got previous. 

A quick peruse at his roster of earlier movies -  Event Horizon, Resident Evil, Death Race – tells the whole story. Crass, dumb, lazy, dispensable action flicks that barely register when you're watching them and are so quickly forgotten afterwards they don't even register for the usual post-pub pint discussion.

Pompeii is absolutely no different. 

It kicks off with Pliny the Younger's quote recalling the 79AD disaster: "You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men.  There were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness forever."

It's a doom-laden feeling that Anderson frequently and unintentionally recreates in his take on the disaster, as a gladiator slave (a limp, ineffectual Kit Harrington) and a nobleman's daughter (Emily Browning) spark an unlikely passion amidst the imminent rumblings of the soon-to-explode Vesuvius volcano.

Keifer Sutherland camps it up as sneering, bizarrely accented Senator Corvus who slaughtered the gladiator's village and family some years earlier. He's clearly in it for the pay cheque, starting off with a certain amount of hand-rubbing, malevolent glee before realising what a total stinker he's gotten himself involved with before slipping into perfunctory evil mode and not really bothering.

So the scene is set for a revenge-romance melodrama that also sees fellow gladiator and at-first potential fight-to-the-death combatant Milo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) spout portentous monologues before predictably and cheesily becoming best buds with our hero. 

The script is credited with three writers but the whole thing feels like it was conceived by a rambling, directionless committee. There's no sense of plot tension or character dynamics and the protagonists and villains are cardboard caricatures cut and paste from previous, better sword-and-sandal disaster epics. 

The acting is hammy, stilted and unintentionally laughable, the dialogue clichéd, and in scale and ambition it gravely over-reaches itself with ideas way above its station or abilities.

On paper the concept must have seemed irresistible, and in better hands it could have been a truly spectacular movie, riffing off interesting, confrontational character arcs against the foreshadowing doom of the disaster-in-waiting.  But it's so leaden and lifeless, it has all the charm and personality of a lacklustre made-for-TV movie, the kind of film you discover in a supermarket bargain basement bin for a fiver then regret even shelling out that. 

Admittedly, when the exploding mountain finally unleashes its shower of spewing molten magma upon the masses, it's done with a certain amount of bombast and scale. But by then it's too late and you're just wishing everyone would hurry up and get torched with the tsunami of pyroclastic debris. Even the occasional, mildly impressive 3D can't redeem it.

The gladiatorial fight scenes lack energy or excitement, delivered with a feeble clanking of swords and half-arsed choreography. Even worse, there's no real brutality or grit to the combat, no 300-style hyper-real blood-letting, severed heads or gushing arteries to ramp up the thrills it so desperately needs.   

It plays more like Braveheart meets Gladiator meets Dante's Peak, plundering other similar, far superior movies and wringing all character empathy or filmic exhilaration from its soulless cinematic gut.

That bargain basement bin would have benefitted from another worthy, woeful addition. 

1.5/5

Reviewed by Jamie Caddick for 365Bristol

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