15) Pompeii
Roland Emmerich, that maestro of CGI destructo-porn madness, took a much-called-for break this year, but Resident Evil director Paul W.S. Anderson happily filled his shoes, delivering a visually overpowering but narratively atrocious blockbuster that made me beg for 10,000 B.C.
Pompeii is a hot mess, an uneasy marriage between the explosive, world-ending action of The Day After Tomorrow and the doomed romance of Titanic. It doesn’t hold a candle to either of those two inspirations, wallowing in an area of general awfulness somewhere in between.
Sadly, Pompeii doesn’t blow its volcanic load until the final third, meaning that far too much of the movie is taken up by slickly filmed but entirely pointless gladiator fights and unspecified politicking between various non-characters. The build-up is absolutely excruciating – if I’d seen this in theaters, I would have advised moviegoers to turn up an hour late.
If Pompeii was content to simply focus on the terror and might of Mount Vesuvius, it could have been an entertaining disaster flick. Instead, Anderson turns the spotlight on a heroic gladiator (Kit Harington, shockingly wooden), whose character development begins and ends at “abs.” This gladiator, you see, is desperately in love with a Roman noblewoman (Emily Browning, probably/definitely asleep), whose character development begins and ends at “pretty.” Do we care? Not at all. Their love affair is so contrived and dull that I actively rooted for the volcano to wipe out every single character, just so I wouldn’t have to put up with it any longer.
