When you head into a film like Pompeii, you should know right away what you're getting into. It's a disaster movie, in which people are not going to be the main characters. Indeed, Paul W.S. Anderson's film is all about a volcano and he makes sure that the audience can never forget about it. In fact, it's never too hard to forget that when the actors are so boring that you have to find something else to focus your attention on.
Pompeii starts off several years before Mount Vesuvius exploded, with young Milo of Britannia witnessing the slaughter of his family at the hand of Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland). Twelve years later, Milo (now played by Game of Thrones' Kit Harrington) is suddenly the meanest gladiator in Britannia. A Pompeii aristocrat buys him and takes back home.
Meanwhile, Cassia (Emily Browning) is on her way back home to Pompeii after spending a year in the politically corrupt Rome. Along the way back, she meets Milo. When she gets back home, she discovers that her father (Richard Harris) is trying to get now-Senator Corvis to invest in Pompeii.
All that plot takes Anderson about an hour to get through and at that point, you could actually leave the theater. The issues are pretty much all wrapped up, but then the volcano explodes. So, there's about 30 minutes of everyone running around and the characters meeting to kill each other.
Anderson can definitely be praised for having a good visual style that at least keeps Pompeii from being a 300 rip-off or an extended episode of Starz's Spartacus. But it is heavy on extended action, brutal violence and an annoying number of unnecessary slow-motion shots. It truly is amazing how far he can push the envelope while keeping a PG-13 rating.
He's also obsessed with wide, overhead shots of the city, minimizing his human characters even further. Anderson should realize that it's not necessary to do that and to shove Vesuvius in our faces whenever possible. We already know the volcano is going to blow, so we don't need hints that the characters can't see. The explosion would have been a much bigger surprise if we didn't know when it was going to happen.
Kit Harrington's Milo is the lead character in the film, but the script, by Janet Scott Batcher, Lee Batcher and Michael Robert Johnson, doesn't give him much to do other than fight and kiss Cassia. Thankfully, Emily Browning is one of the brighter spots in the cast, but she gets some really terrible and cliché dialogue. The other major character is our villain, Corvis, played by the woefully miscast Keifer Sutherland. Adewale Akinnuuoye-Agbaje is good as Milo's challenger in the arena, who, of course, becomes his friend.
Sony released the film on Blu-ray this week with a nice selection of bonus material on various aspects of the film, headlined by 20 minutes of deleted sequences and a commentary from Anderson. If you're curious about how the film was put together, these are definitely worth sitting through. Pompeii was actually a Canadian-German co-production, made by Constantin Film and Impact Pictures.
Pompeii never aspires to be more than a disaster movie, but perhaps if Anderson could have cast some more talented stars, this may have done better. He's not a director known for impressing critics and he certainly didn't impress here. He has a great sense of creating visuals, but has a hard time getting good performances. This is a great movie to get if you want to test your home theater system, though.