The tagline reads, “No Warning, No Escape”. No better words could describe the feeling of watching Paul W.S. Anderson’s new action/romance, Pompeii. The movie is set in the Roman city of Pompeii, where Milo (Kit Harington) is a slave turned gladiator who finds himself in a race against time to save his true love Cassia (Emily Browning), the daughter of a wealthy merchant who has been unwillingly betrothed to the corrupt Roman Senator Corvis (Kiefer Sutherland). As Mount Vesuvius erupts, Milo must fight his way out of the arena in order to save his beloved as the city crumbles around him. What should have been a fun and unoriginal story we’ve all seen before turns into a clichéd mess where if the people of Pompeii could, they would weep once again.
Paul W.S. Anderson has made a good career out of doing these big budgeted special effects movies (Resident Evil franchise, Alien vs. Predator, Death Race, etc.) He definitely has a style of filmmaker that is all his own, and Pompeii is no exception. His filmmaking is all surface that leaves you with no substance behind it. He never tries to think outside the box in his filmmaking, so what you see is the best it’s gonna get. With lackluster shot compositions, over used fight-choreography we’ve seen dozens of times in better products, and enough slow-motion action scenes that if you were playing a drinking game you would have been well wasted within the first 30 minutes. This movie should be studied as to what not to do when making uninspired rubbish.
No one can blame the actors for their portrayals of their characters, they’re there to do a job and do it the best they can. And for the most part, everyone is doing some passable acting, even though they know what they’re doing is terrible. Each line just gets worse and worse throughout the flick, but seasoned actors like Jared Harris and Carrie-Ann Moss make the most out of what they need to do, as does the three leads: Kit Harington, Emily Browning, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. All give good performances surrounded in a world of bad. They are likeable, and you do want them to have their happy endings, as unlikely as that seems. Each bring their own style and talent as best as they can. Frankly, their acting isn’t the issue, Kiefer Sutherland’s is.
Sutherland is no stranger to acting, he has been doing so since he was a teenager. He has multiple awards: Screen Actors Guild, Emmy’s, and a Golden Globe, all for best acting. So when you watch him in this performance alone, it’ll feel like all his accomplishments should be taken away as punishment. From the moment he comes on screen, he’s in a totally different movie than the rest of the cast. Everything he does tells you that: from his speech, body movements, and his barely awake look, he could not care less and would rather be anywhere else than in this movie. He’s doing some sort of early New York gangster accent that is so bad it becomes laughable. To say he was over acting would be generous, there are no words for what he’s doing.
Now being based on a real life event, there should be no surprise that Mount Vesuvius is going to erupt. But how does a filmmaker express that? Well, Paul W.S. Anderson’s answer was to have the mountain continually be a reminder of the threat that is coming by means of a bunch of slow shots showing us the “evil mountain” that clearly has a diabolical plan. The filmmakers almost make the mountain a character. You understand what the filmmakers are doing, they’re showing us no matter what the people do, there is this ominous dreadful thing always lurking in the shadows. But there are many different and better ways to convey this other than making the mountain evil. It’s not Mount Doom surging with dark forces of Mordor, it’s just a regular normal volcano, doing what volcanoes do.
So when Mount Vesuvius finally gets its big performance in the movie, everything that could go wrong just so happens to go wrong at that moment. Our heroes are trying to escape, save the girl, defeat the bad guy, and out run a wall of fire and lava. It’s a little too much going on for a final act in a movie that scarcely had “acts” to begin with. By this point in the movie the whole theater was bent over with laughter at the dialogue, the poor action sequences, and the final battle between Milo and Senator Corvis. At certain points you just start rooting for the volcano.
The special effects are decent for this kind of movie, but overuse starts to hurt your eyes by the end. For the final escape out of Pompeii, you know there is no set and that all the actors are on green screens, but it becomes so obvious that the actors start to glow. Sometimes that can’t be helped, but perhaps the filmmakers should have saved some money on fixing that issue rather than worrying about the movie being a 3D mess. Other than ash falling continually and rocks flying at your face now and then, there are no other 3D gimmicks. This is a movie that had no reason to be in 3D, the filmmakers never make use of why 3D would have been used.
This is a terrible film. If the movies Titanic and Gladiator had a misshapen baby, it would be Pompeii. It has awful dialogue being said by good actors, decent to passable special effects, and a story that feel more like a teenage Harlequin romance novel rather than a multi-million dollar big budget movie. This is just a swing and a miss on so many levels to count. But if there is a silver lining to this flick, it’s the funniest movie of 2014 so far, but for all the wrong reasons.