This Pompeii is more shmaltz than spark
Pompeii attracts more than 2.5 million visitors a year, and the plaster casts of its ancient victims welcome millions more in museums around the world.
We’re fascinated by the disaster because it’s the original car crash. Tragedy unfolded in a few moments, and we can see the grisly results with our own eyes. The only thing we have left to imagine is the moment where all those screaming souls were wrapped in a smoking black blanket of glowing lava, ash and pumice.
That’s why movies like Pompeii exist: So we can satisfy our curiosity about those final, suffocating moments and actually see what happens to a human body when it’s swallowed whole by a glowing flow of liquid rock.
Yet, we don’t actually get that one morbid money shot in this new cinematic take on the tragedy of 79 AD, which proves the film’s biggest disappointment.
This film by Paul W.S. Anderson (Death Race, Resident Evil) has Cecil B. deMille-scale ambitions as it cloaks this disaster spectacle in a lacy bodice, desperate to be undone by none other than the central hero, Milo (Kit Harington).
A long-haired boy who watched his father murdered by a nasty Roman (Kiefer Sutherland), Milo is taken captive and raised as a slave. But he never forgot the face of the man who ran a blade through his father’s chest, and he’s eager for some payback.
The only problem is: He’s a slave who has to fight for Roman amusement. He has no shot at freedom until he meets Cassia (Emily Browning), the daughter of the local administrator (Jared Harris) who recognizes his gift with horses, as well as his chiselled alabaster abs.
Cassia would like to unchain Milo’s manly body, but Corvus (Sutherland) has other plans for both the slave and the pretty girl — all of which conveniently come to a head the night of the big eruption.
There’s no significant flaw with the design. We’re given a chain of predictable B-movie moments as Corvus grows more evil and Milo grows more bold, all while Vesuvius rumbles up a storm in the background.
As modern viewers who know how it all turns out for the poor people of Pompeii, we’re just waiting for the ash to fly and the skin to singe and the sky to blacken — just as Pliny the Younger wrote as he chronicled the event back in the day.
But Anderson makes us wait, and wait, for the big visual effects payoff. When it finally lands like a burning fireball in our lap, it’s not only underwhelming, it doesn’t come near to capturing the horror we were waiting for.
We don’t see a single body enveloped in red-hot lava. Instead, we’re given a cheesy romantic plot line about Cassia and the horse whisperer, which isn’t just irritating and silly, it’s not even hot.
This is not a fault of the actors. Harington (Game of Thrones) smoulders in isolation and Browning sends off stray sparks in every scene, even when the writing is a cold bucket of water. They’re really in the moment.
Even Sutherland brings his best villain’s grin to the mix, proving those Sutherlands know how to make the most of their ice-blue eyes.
It’s the viewers who are left to suffocate in the greasy darkness of this puffing mountain of molten cliché. We’re the ones who sat in our chairs waiting for the Hollywood gods to save us, only to be swallowed whole by a thick river of shmaltz.