Pompeii (2014)

5 of 10

Personal Bias Alert:  Kit Harrington looks good in leather, this is my first Paul W.S. Anderson film

            Kill a horse and she’s smitten.  Express your desire to kill an entire city?  Then it’s love.  That kind of ridiculously hilarious storytelling pervades “Pompeii,” but if you’re willing to meet the film halfway, then there’s fun to be had.

            “Pompeii” tells the story of Milo (Kit Harrington), a gladiator who is brought to Pompeii by his owners to battle the reigning champ Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje).  The two gladiators become friends, and Milo catches the eye of the daughter of a wealthy merchant named Cassia (Emily Browning).  Cassia is also being pursued by the Roman Senator Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland), who thwarts the young lover’s attempts to be together as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroys the city.

            This film can be broken down into two parts.  The first half is a “Gladiator” rip-off, right down to the “the man who is making me fight killed my family” thing.  The second half is a basic disaster film.  The stories feel a bit separate, probably because they stick closely to the tropes of two different genres.  The through-line is the forbidden love of Milo and Cassia.  If their relationship was strong then the film probably would have held together, but Harrington and Browning never develop a spark.  We’re told they love each other, but in reality they hardly see each other, and their early scenes are some of the most poorly written moments of the film.  They do look good together, though.

            Both gladiator and disaster genres are filled with action, which at least gives the sensation of forward progress in a film where the ending is inevitable.  A fight breaks out about every five minutes, and even if it they aren’t the most clearly edited sequences, they do look good.  That’s about the best thing I can say about this film:  It looks good.  The sets and clothing are well designed, and once the eruption starts the destruction is rendered with some decent CGI work. 

            Your enjoyment of the film will be largely dependent on how you approach it.  I went in ready to laugh at what I thought would be an overdone mess filled with cheesy dialogue and ludicrous plot points.  It delivered.  I could fill this review with a list of every plot point that made me chuckle, but I’ll leave you with my example from the first paragraph.  I refrained from laughing out loud because many of the people in the theater were enjoying it as the action-romance story the filmmakers intended it to be.  A woman next to me had several audible reactions to the film, and she was not watching it for the same reasons I was.

            So keep an open mind with this film.  If you like hollow action-romances or so-bad-it’s-funny movies, then put this one on your guilty pleasure shelf and pull it out sometime on a rainy afternoon.  You could do far worse.

Other Notes:

Ø  Kit Harrington ("Game of Thrones") really needs to do something set in modern time.  He’s in serious danger of getting typecast.

Ø  Friends never live.  Never.

Ø  The exchange between Cassia and her friend about Milo’s muscles was epically bad.

Ø  That last kiss brought the heat!