Pompeii review: A whole lotta lava and boredom

There’s only question that needs to be answered so far as Paul WS Anderson’s Pompeii is concerned: Can Kit Harington do a Rajinikanth?

As a Roman slave known as The Celt, Harington’s role requires him to

1. Be a lightning-fast gladiator, who can move swish, swoop and slice his opponent in the blink of an eye, 2. Be an expert horseman even though he’s never been allowed to go near a horse (he was born into a horse tribe, so it’s in his genes you see), 3. run marathon-worthy distances in the middle of a volcanic eruption, 4. smoulder.

Harington meets the last requirement admirably. In his first scene, The Celt comes out wearing pants and a patch of leather on his shoulder. This is not a bad thing because it gives us a glimpse of what’s usually under many layers when Harington plays Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. Unfortunately, even though this first fight is in damp and chilly Britannia (as the British Isles were know in AD 88 or thereabouts) and the rest of the movie is set in sunny Pompeii, The Celt is all covered up for the rest of the movie. You’d have thought that he’d wear even less in the August sunshine, but when he’s in the arena in Italy, The Celt is kitted out in torso-covering armour.

This is a shame because if one is going to watch a film with no plot to speak of, then there should be something upon which we can feast our eyes. Unfortunately, despite the presence of Harington and the still-gorgeous Carrie Ann Moss, there’s not much to feast upon. However, Indian audiences may well feel a pang of nostalgia for vintage Bollywood at its campiest best while watching Pompeii. Had directors like Manmohan Desai been given the kind of budget that Anderson had, they could have shown Hollywood how campy kitsch is really done.

Instead, what we get is a film that makes you wish within a few minutes that Vesuvius would erupt already and kill all the characters. The acting in Pompeii is atrocious, with every actor drawing out each line like they’re powered by batteries that are dying out. There aren’t enough fight scenes to keep the adrenalin going and you can’t help wondering if Vesuvius ultimately erupted because it was just sick of how boring and inane the town of Pompeii was.

The plot, if one can call it that, is that Pompeii, located at the base of Mount Vesuvius, has no idea that the mountain’s about to explode. Everyone’s busy with the feast of Vinalia, which involves a group of gladiators hacking one another to bits in an arena. There are little earthquakes that signal things are about to literally fall apart, but no one pays them much attention. In the couple of days that Pompeii covers, The Celt has to make friends with his rival, an undefeated black warrior named Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje); fall in love with a noblewoman named Cassia (Emily Browning); avenge his parents death by killing the Roman senator Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland); and establish himself as a horse whisperer. Oh, and rewrite history in the gladiator arena. Basically, The Celt is the Rajinikanth of ancient Rome.

The good news is that the eruption of Vesuvius is beautifully done. In fact, it’s the only thing in Pompeii that seems real. The film’s visual effects team have done a fantastic job of recreating the natural disaster. From the fluttering delicacy of the falling ash to the doom-laden clouds, it’s wonderfully imagined. Everything and everyone else in Pompeii is ridiculously artificial. Worse, the wait for the final eruption feels tiresome because the conflicts are weak and the action sequences are thoroughly unimpressive. Pompeii is a disaster movie, so it’s not as though anyone should expect much by way of logic or narrative, but you do expect some spectacules. Sadly, Anderson delivers too little too late.