Pompeii

When the love or motivation of the main characters is formed by a single bit of dialogue or a transparent situation, not even excellent casting can help. Kit Harington, Kiefer Sutherland, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje can work hard to bring some freshness to their stereotypical characters, but it only lasts until the script inserts another one-word confession into their mouths. After the highly entertaining The Three Musketeers, I expected Paul W.S. Anderson's next journey into history to be a perfect fit, but despite the fights, horses, destruction, or lava of Pompeii, it puts you to sleep more than it entertains you. (06/17/2014)

One day, Paul Anderson and Milla Jovovich were bored, lounging by the big swimming pool of their Florida beach house, on the table they had grapes, a bottle of Richeourg 1961 and a plate packed with truffles and crab claws. “Hey, Milla,” says Paul suddenly, “I think we need to enliven our marriage somehow, give it a new drive.” “Yeah, you’re right” replies Milla, “the only thing I can think of is a new, beautiful luxury yacht. We still don’t have one. It’d be the spark we need in our lives!” “You’re right,” said Paul, “a yacht would be fine. Abramovich has one, you know, the owner of Chelsea, or whatever the name of that soccer club is, and he’s really happy with it. But where can we get money for it? Resident Evil won’t cut it anymore. I’ve got an idea! We can make...” And Milla interrupts enthusiastically “Resident Evil 6 and Three Musketeers: Revenge From the Past! A crossover that will blow audiences’ minds!“ “Nah,” replies Paul waving his hand, “we need to be smarter. Think about this, what have been the most successful movies of the last few years? But REALLY successful. Titanic and Gladiator!!“ Milla looks at Paul flabbergasted, almost choking with a truffle. Paul gets up from his chair, clearly in his element, and speaks so passionately that he's waving his hands: “We’ll blend these two hits, it’ll be awesome! Pompeii I’ll call it! We rip-off the fights, the concept, the course and the twist from Gladiator, and from Titanic we cram in the fateful love, so that teenage girls will like it. The hero will be played by some beefcake or another, it doesn’t matter if he can’t act, the girls won’t mind. And we’ll save on the script, it’s not important. The main thing is to pack it with as much CGI as possible. It’ll be MASSIVE!!” Screams Paul until he’s almost popping a vein. “Milla, it’ll be a motherfucking hit!!!” Milla thinks for a moment, swallows a grape, cracks her knuckles and then asks, frostily, expecting an affirmative answer: “And darling, will there be a part for me?” (05/03/2014)

Pompeii is a film that was made primarily for its spectacular depiction of one of nature's most famous disasters, which was achieved with great audiovisual effects. The story itself is one big and predictable cliché, but I have to commend the very end, which indeed pleased me in terms of the script. The cast was mostly likeable, except that I had trouble understanding at times because I saw the film in the original and without subtitles. But I went to the cinema to get a proper dose of effects, which I got, so I was satisfied after the screening. In short, a "popcorn movie" that fits and needs to be seen on the big screen, otherwise its primary purpose is completely lost (03/11/2014)

Flat like a week-open can of Bud. This time it isn’t Anderson’s fault alone. A screenwriter’s mishmash of Gladiator, Spartacus and Dante’s Peak suffers from inane dialogs and mostly predictable plot. Jon Snow is a bit stiff, but if he doesn’t attempt any romance, he’s bearable. Kiefer gets almost perverted enjoyment from playing the villain from the Reich, but that doesn’t make the end result much better. The only really good thing is Shorter’s music, the volcano action in the finale, and I was surprise that it was all over. Do you like sport? (05/31/2014)

The main and practically only unusual thing about Pompeii is the effort combine disaster-flick spectacle with antiquity action. The two types of film are melded together through the clever use of melodramatic conventions, as the essence of the genre calls for the extinction of both the gladiator and the individual facing the wrath of nature. Roughly half of the film consists in setting up the narrative background required for the individualistic hero’s effective engagement with external events and it is exceedingly obvious that Anderson does not enjoy directing actors (if anyone is interested how Kit Harington performs, he performs exactly as he does in Game of Thrones). Thanks to this basic arrangement of relationships and motifs, on the other hand, Anderson is able to engage in PG-13 fight scenes and spectacular Emmerich-esque destruction until the end. It’s a satisfactory spectacle, but it’s nothing special even in 3D, which only really works when the action takes place on multiple levels (roughly one or two scenes). The action scenes are muddled due to the quick editing and off-centre compositions (the characters nonsensically fight at the edge of screen multiple times). In addition to that, they are much more grounded and with less video-game stylisation that you would expect from the director of Mortal Kombat, multiple instalments of the Resident Evil franchise and Death Race. The games resemble “bird's-eye-view” shots of the city (as from an RTS), whose main purpose is to prepare us for the aforementioned combining of genres, i.e. for the biblical scale of the impending devastation. The religious subtext or, more precisely, the use of the principle of divine justice is the only instance of reviving the popular leftist story of a man of the people who stands up to a powerful empire personified by a greedy senator (Kiefer Sutherland delivers the only – and probably unintentionally – funny line in the entire film). Pompeii isn’t as blatantly stupid as Need for Speed; I’d even venture to say that it contains a small amount of historical truth, but as with Need for Speed, you will likely walk out of the cinema unsatisfied if you don’t appreciate how exemplarily it fills out the classic Hollywood narrative template and genre formulas. 65% (03/19/2014)