A poor man’s amalgamation of several other movies, Pomepeii is poorly written mess that feels almost entirely pointless.

Writing a plot summary seems redundant because before you walk in you’ve seen this movie several times before but Pompeii tells the story of Milo the Celt (Kit Harington), a slave turned Gladiator, whose entire village was destroyed by Roman soldiers led by Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland), who is brought to Pompeii to fight has a meet cute with Cassia (Emily Browning) when he has to break the neck of a horse that fell down. She turns out to be the daughter of a wealthy merchant in Pompeii, Severus (Jared Harris), who is trying to broker a land deal with Rome to establish more modern accommodations for the city. This brings Corvus in to deal with Severus on behalf of the emperor while Milo is kicking ass in the arena  and the stage is set for all sorts of wackiness. Oh and Mt Vesuvius is there being a volcano in the background.

Pompeii is as derivative a film as I have ever seen. It is a patchwork construction of other movies like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster that just doesn’t measure up to the sum of its parts. If you have ever seen Gladiator, Titanic, Spartacus, 12 Years a Slave, Dante’s Peak, Volcano and any romantic drama made in the last 30 years then you have seen pretty much everything that Pompeii has to offer. Well maybe not Kit Harington’s abs. Those are here and may pan out pretty well for the ladies.

It would be one thing if it were a riff on any or all of the aforementioned films but brought its own spark or new idea to the mix but it really doesn’t. The action is passable here but at PG-13 it is fairly tame and if you have seen Spartacus or Gladiator then you are going to feel like you are getting a watered down version and that is largely because you are. The same goes for the political maneuvering and the love story. They feel very light and without much substance. It is there and it isn’t especially ridiculous but it also just isn’t very compelling and just feels like fluff to pad out the time until the volcano blows up and kills everyone. If that is a spoiler for you then you really should read more history.

Aside from the general blandness and that fact that no new ground is broken here, not including scenes in which the ground literally breaks, what really screws this movie is that the writing is so poor and the editing is so bad that the film has no hope to be taken seriously. Dialogue is often terrible and the movement of the story makes very little sense. Occasional cuts to Vesuvius just to remind people that there is a volcano around and it is getting closer and closer to blow come off as silly afterthoughts as opposed to proper tension builders and serve to undercut whatever drama is unfolding because it is a constant reminder that none of the political in fighting and intrigue is worth a damn because it will all be over when the volcano blows.

This undercurrent of futility could have been a theme and could have been mined for dramatic gold in the hands of a more competent storyteller but unfortunately the screenwriters involved are not up to the task. It is very possible that more of the blame falls to director Paul WS Anderson for leaving a lot of story on the page but it is very hard to see anything redeeming that could have been on there. Maybe the problem is that any story against the backdrop of such a disaster will fall flat but the construction seemed to work well enough for Titanic. Revisionist history tries to tell a different story about that film’s quality but you don’t make that much money because people hate it. This kind of story can be done well but just pantomiming a much better version is not the way to do it.

The romance angle here is really on auto-pilot as well. I can’t say that I ever much cared one way or another about what was up with Milo and Cassia and I think that maybe this should have been ignored and more focus should have been given to the bromance between Milo and Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a rival gladiator who befriends Milo. The chemistry here was great and was much more interesting and rewarding a friendship. In fact, Atticus as a character was easily the most interesting in the movie and this was the relationship I was invested in. Sure, we have seen this sort of thing before, most notably in Gladiator between Maximus and Juba, but it was the one good thing going for this movie so I cling to it like that debris at the end of Titanic.

As much of a mess as the movie was, the performances weren’t terrible with Kit Harington pulling off a convincing enough fighter in the arena. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje was legitimately fun to watch and I really wish he were in a better movie. The same goes for Sasha Roiz as Corvus’s henchman Proculus. I love him on Grimm and he was good enough here but again I would like it to have been in a better movie. Everyone else does well enough with what they had to work with but they are not alchemists and they can not turn this lead into gold.

Conclusion [3.5 out of 10]

Pompeii is a movie best avoided unless you are looking to laugh at a bad movie or riff with your friends. There is really nothing on screen you haven’t seen better elsewhere and it does nothing to distinguish itself from the movies from which it cribs. Even if you are into watching uninteresting characters get killed by lava, there are better options out there.