Any big budget historical epic aims to tread the fine line between historical accuracy and crowd-pleasing entertainment, but plenty of them have failed on both counts. Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii wasn’t one of them, though, even if plenty of scholarly praise didn’t compensate for the fact the $100 million romantic disaster story bombed at the box office.
If anything, the movie arrived a few years too late, with the genre’s post-Gladiator boom well and truly over by the time Pompeii came to theaters in February 2014. Of course, it didn’t help that the story was relentlessly dull and monotonously uninteresting until the titular town was reduced to smoldering nothingness by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but a couple of exciting set pieces tacked onto the third act of a 105-minute running time isn’t enough.
Kit Harington smolders as slave-turned-gladiator Milo, who faces the obstacle of forbidden love in among the molten hellfire raining down on Pompeii. Emily Browning’s Cassia has been promised to Kiefer Sutherland’s corrupt Corvus, meaning that politics also have to be navigated on the way to romance, as well as class, social status, and volcanic destruction.
There’s some solid production design and impressive visual effects throughout, but Sutherland’s knowingly hammy turn as the scenery-chewing villain is the only performance that’s anywhere approaching memorable. It’s far from being the 21st Century’s greatest swords-and-sandals epic, but Pompeii has nonetheless become a serious hit on Netflix this weekend.
As per FlixPatrol, the underwhelming and forgettable tale has scored multiple Top 10 finishes around the world to score a place on the global most-watched chart, eight years after largely sinking without a trace during its initial run.
Published: Apr 3, 2022 03:17 am