I won’t pretend that I’ve seen all of director Paul WS Anderson’s work. I’m not sure that I’ve even sat through an entire Resident Evil movie. But I’ve seen enough of what he’s done to have an expectation that his films are going to be tacky and juvenile, and are going to be aimed at audiences who are lacking in discerning tastes. Because of this, I wasn’t too excited to hear that he was going to turn the destruction of the city of Pompeii into a historical disaster epic. Once it was announced that Kit Harington and Emily Browning were going to be playing his leads, however, suddenly I found new interest that bubbled up and threatened to erupt out of seemingly nowhere.
With leads as powerfully attractive and inarguably crush-worthy as Harington and Browning, could it be possible that Pompeii would be able to rein in Anderson’s worst tendencies enough to properly focus on their beauty and at least be an enjoyable guilty pleasure? Happily, for everyone as shallow as me, it does. Good lord, those two are on fire in this movie. Harington, with those glistening abs and those pouty lips. Damn. Browning, with her milky skin and that angel face. Shit. You get so caught up in ogling them that you tend to forget that a giant volcano is about to erupt and kill everybody.
There’s still a plot that happens in the background of the beauty pageant and the natural disaster though. Harington is playing a slave who watched his entire family get murdered in front of him when he was very young, and who has been trained as a gladiator ever since. Browning is playing the daughter of the dude who controls Pompeii. She recently had some troubles with a potential suitor who was pursuing her too aggressively when she was living in Rome. Kiefer Sutherland plays a Roman Senator who happens to be the dude who killed Harington’s family, who happens to be the guy who was pursuing Browning in Rome, and who has just arrived in Pompeii to make everyone’s lives miserable. Things get especially messy once he finds out that Harington and Browning have been making star-crossed eyes at each other.
Let’s not get too hung up on the plot though. That’s not really what’s important here, and whenever the movie is trying to establish its characters or milk the interpersonal drama between them is when it’s at its worst. All you have to know is that the two kids want to bone and an old jerk doesn’t want them to, so he’s going to use his power and influence to make sure that the rich girl’s parents force her into marrying him and the slave boy gets gruesomely killed in the arena. Once we get into that arena and the gladiator fights start happening is when the movie gets good. Or, it’s at least when it gets watchable.
Basically, the entire second half of Pompeii is a bunch of gladiators and soldiers battling in an arena, an erupting volcano wiping an entire city off of the map and killing everyone during the battles, and a bunch of one-on-one moments both violent and romantic that get shared between the main players as all of the destruction is happening in the background. It’s all wildly stupid, but still fun enough that it’s not so bad the sit through once. To be more clear, it’s watchable because the camera work is skilled enough and the effects are strong enough that you can follow and be engaged by the action that’s happening on the screen without thinking about the crafting, and it’s stupid because the fire, rock, and ash raining down from the heavens is the sort that stops and starts whenever the script needs it to. Need there to be a chase scene? Death is raining down from above. Need there to be a tender dialogue scene? The death and noise stops for exactly the amount of time it needs to so that everyone can say what they need to say.
The presentation is so unbelievably phony that the movie never really engages your emotions in any way. It’s tough to create thrilling moments before you’ve established a sense of reality or danger, and this movie contains no reality and no danger whatsoever. The protagonists here exist so comfortably and for so long in the midst of utter doom and destruction that after about two minutes of it, any stakes it might have had are completely out the window. The movie does work as spectacle though—as eye candy—and Sutherland is so sneering, smarmy, and despicable as the villain that the action never just becomes meaningless noise. You hate him so much that you stay engaged as you impatiently wait for the moment when he’ll finally get his comeuppance. In Kiefer we trust.
With Pompeii, Anderson has made a movie that’s simple, pandering, and unapologetically stupid, but seeing as it’s so unapologetic about what it is and seeing as it doesn’t ever try to overextend itself, it doesn’t end up being all that offensive to watch. It’s a fun enough way to kill some time, just so long as you’re prepared to laugh along at everything it serves up and don’t approach it with any sort of expectations or, god forbid, a desire to pick it apart. Often when people are defending movies like this they say to “turn your brain off,” but that’s not really a good way to describe what you’re doing. If you have to turn your brain off, it’s because a movie is stupid and offers up no real pleasures in return for its stupidity.
If something isn’t really any good, but is mostly just trying to be a casual romp, what you really have to do is re-contextualize it as camp. Hit it with a dusting of irony and chuckle at the intentions of the creators. That’s not really turning your brain off at all. If anything, it’s actually choosing to look at something at a deeper than surface level. See? It tricked you into thinking. Movies like Pompeii aren’t quite as stupid as you thought. Maybe.
