Pompeii (2014) 5/10

Starring : Kit Harington, Emily Browning, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Jessica Lucas, Carrie-Anne Moss, Jared Harris, Kiefer Sutherland
Director : Paul W S Anderson
Running Time : 105 mins

A slave named Milo (Harington) is forced into fighting as a gladiator in 1st Century Pompeii. His only dream is to save the life of Cassia (Browning), the woman he has grown to love, who has been promised to Roman Senator Corvus (Sutherland) who wishes to marry her. But as he fights for her, Mount Vesuvius begins to erupt, threatening everyone who lives in its shadow.

I don’t know what the makers of this movie were trying to achieve by throwing a love story into an actual historical event, but the end result is incredibly ill conceived. Like Titanic, we know the relationship is probably doomed from the get go, but at least there was hope in Titanic. In this I just didn’t care what happened to the incredibly wooden characters, and when the inevitable happened (more than half way through the movie) it came as something of a relief. The fight scenes are okay, but they were just too few and far between, and the action sequences for the volcano (and for some reason tsunami) were ridiculously inaccurate.

You’ll like this if you liked : Gladiator