The jury’s still out as to whether Paul W.S. Anderson – the British hack responsible for all those never-ending Resident Evil movies – deserves the auteurist readings granted recently in some critical circles. But if there’s one thing Pompeii proves, it’s that if you ever needed to gather an assortment of non-blockbuster-marquee TV faces – Kiefer Sutherland (24), Kit Harrington (Game of Thrones), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Lost), Jared Harris (Mad Men) – just so you can drizzle volcanic ash on them, then Anderson would be the right man for the job. A loftier director might have instilled a sense of purpose to the material, and probably inflate the running time to an excruciating two-hours-plus, but not Anderson, who plays this thing for what it really is: a totally cheesy hybrid of sword-and-sandal adventure and disaster hokum.
Though the film’s raison d’etre is historically sound (Mount Vesuvius did erupt and destroy Pompeii in 79 AD), everything else is fictional, pure potboiler pulp, economically mixing romance, politics and revenge into the pot. Between the blandly attractive leads delivering leaden dialogue, Sutherland’s entertainingly hammy performance, and the copious amounts of steel-abbed sword combat, there’s a lot of cheddar to work through here. The climax is, appropriately, a visually lush digital symphony of collapsing arenas, spewing fireballs and raining molten rock, but lest such catastrophe not be exciting enough, Anderson throws in a ridiculous last-minute chariot chase in the midst of it all, inching Pompeii from just being dumb to splendidly dumb.
‘Pompeii’ Movie Times (also in 3D)
