As a romantic historical epic filled with gladiatorial combat, romance, revenge, and eye-popping spectacle, Pompeii would have been a cinematic triumph … had it been made and released prior to the summer of 2000, when Ridley Scott’s Gladiator set a new bar for quality in sword-and-sandal extravaganzas.
Thus, in 2014 Pompeii just looks and feels like it’s aping that other, far-better film, with bits of James Cameron’s Titanic thrown in to cover the disaster movie moments that dominate the film’s last act.
In 62 AD Britannia, a young boy witnesses his family and his people slaughtered at the hands of Roman General Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland), as his legions put down a bloody rebellion by the boy’s Celtic tribe. Seventeen years later, that boy has grown to manhood as a slave, fighting in the muddy, rain-soaked gladiator pits of Londinium. His ferocity against his opponents, as well as his unwillingness to share his given name, have earned him the moniker “The Celt”, and his victories draw the attention of a wealthy gladiator impressario from Pompeii, Graecus (Joe Pingue). Graecus deems the Celt perfect to infuse new life into the games in Pompeii, and so decides to bring him along as he travels south for home.
While on the journey, the slave caravan crosses paths with a carriage carrying Cassia (Emily Browning, Sucker Punch), the daughter of one of Pompeii’s wealthiest merchants. Cassia’s and the Celt’s eyes meet, and the attraction is (of course) instantaneous. Cassia’s interest in him is fairly easy to understand: in addition to the man not having a single scar on his face despite a life of combat and killing, she is happily returning home from a year spent in Rome, surrounded by men wholly corrupted by their wealth and power. With a single gesture of kindness during their brief encounter, the Celt burns himself into her memory by simply being everything that the Roman men were not.
As for his interest, well, she’s pretty and she was nice to him. Guys aren’t that complicated.
Once in Pompeii, the Celt finds a rival in his new cellmate, Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Thor: The Dark World, “Lost”), a seasoned gladiator on the verge of earning his freedom, and once again encounters Corvus, now a Roman senator visiting the city on behalf of the Emperor, who has his eyes on Cassia and wealth to be made for himself in the prosperous vacation town. Their paths, along with that of Cassia, all collide in Pompeii’s arena, where it seems that the Celt’s long-sought revenge will finally be within his grasp and his destiny revealed … until Mt. Vesuvius decides to blow its top, literally. Then it becomes a matter of who will survive the resulting earthquake, avalanche of ash and boiling steam, rain of rocks and lava bombs, and tsunami that will eventually lead to the complete destruction of the city in one of the ancient world’s most infamous natural disasters.
Director Paul W.S. Anderson, the man behind the Resident Evil franchise of films (he produced all five installments and directed three of them), whose most recent attempt at directing period action was his much-maligned steampunk-influenced take on The Three Musketeers in 2011, takes a more grounded approach to bringing this cataclysm to the big screen. To his credit, he’s clearly done his homework, and the care and attention to detail devoted to not just the progression of the disaster, but also life for the people of Pompeii prior to the city’s demise, is clear throughout the production.
Anderson also presents the action throughout the film capably, as a veteran director of sci-fi and fantasy action should. In particular, he chooses to stay away from overuse of slow motion, a hallmark of his Resident Evil films, and lets the energetic fight and stunt choreography stand out. Whether it’s horse and chariot chases, large-scale battles, or single gladiatorial combat, the action never bores. However, his overuse of 3D certainly does grate after a while, but that’s nothing new, especially if you’ve seen his other work.
Despite all that’s done competently or even done well in Pompeii, Anderson and his cast and crew make the same mistake that Michael Bay made in Pearl Harbor, that Roland Emmerich has made in every large-scale disaster film he’s made post-Independence Day, and that arguably Cameron made in Titanic: focus everything on the special effects necessary to bring the calamity to life, and make the lead characters suffering through said calamity as dull, underdeveloped, and uninteresting as possible. Kit Harington isn’t asked to waver very far from his work on “Game of Thrones” to bring the Celt to life on screen — just add a little of Gladiator‘s Maximus’s confidence and physicality to Jon Snow’s quiet, brooding countenance. Don’t be surprised if he reminds you a little of Orlando Bloom in his Pirates of the Caribbean days. Emily Browning’s Cassia is equally bland, but at least the two look pretty together on-screen, even covered in dirt and volcanic ash. Contrarily, Sutherland does his absolute best to make Senator Corvus is hissably hateable as possible, but the odd lisp he adopts for his speech just makes him sound ridiculous, as though he sorely missing having a mustache to twirl and needs another “evil” mannerism to constantly remind the audiences that he’s not, in fact, Jack Bauer running around in Roman armor and a cape.
Never mind the fact that everything here looks and feels like it’s been done better in previous films — that’s certainly true here, but it’s not the worst offense. For a disaster movie to really hit home, you have to care about what happens to the various characters, and in order for audiences to care, the characters have to be interesting and/or relateable. In Pompeii, the characters are neither, and thus their story prior to Vesuvius’s eruption just feels obligatory, and their story after the eruption really has only one compelling question: “Okay, do they all die, or does someone live to tell the tale?”
If you know anything about what actually happened in Pompeii or ancient Roman history, you already know the answer to that question.
Score: 2 out of 5
Pompeii
Starring Kit Harington, Carrie-Anne Moss, Emily Browning, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Jessica Lucas, Currie Graham, Sasha Roiz, with Jared Harris, and Kiefer Sutherland. Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson.
Running Time: 105 minutes
Rated PG-13 for intense battle sequences, disaster-related action and brief sexual content.