Blows smoke

Man, when is somebody going to make a good volcano movie? There was that stupid phase in the late ’90s when Hollywood took a crack at it, giving us Tommy Lee Jones dealing with an eruption in downtown L.A. and that other one with Pierce Brosnan outrunning a pyroclastic cloud in a beater pickup truck.

Now comes Pompeii, a film about the legendary volcanic eruption that buried an ancient city and eventually produced those creepy plaster casts of contorted dead humans and dogs.

If ever there was a good setting for a decent movie featuring lots of lava, I would think the story of how Mount Vesuvius blew would be intriguing. However, Paul W.S. Anderson directed this one, and that rarely bodes well for a film. Anderson has a way of destroying interesting premises with his sloppy hand. For prime examples of how he screws things up old school, see Alien vs. Predator, Resident Evil: Afterlife, The Three Musketeers or Death Race. Or, better yet, don’t see them.

Anderson takes the historic eruption and makes it the basis for what he probably hoped would be his Titanic. He has a love story, he has a lot of people scurrying for their lives, he even has the mournful female vocals that sound a lot like Celine Dion.

He even has a cartoonish villain like the one Billy Zane played in James Cameron’s epic. This one’s an evil Roman senator played by Kiefer Sutherland doing his best Darth Vader voice. Sutherland hasn’t been this embarrassingly bad since he appeared in The Three Musketeers (not Anderson’s Musketeers, mind you, but another abysmally bad take on the classic from back in ’93).

The goofy love story is embodied by Emily Browning—no stranger to bad films, having appeared in Sucker Punch—as the rich girl Cassia, and ab-tastic douchebag Kit Harington as slave/gladiator Milo. The two want to be in love, but they can’t because he’s all poor and emo, and she’s rich. Better they can’t be in love, for Browning needs a reason to pout. That’s about all she’s good for in movies.

The film is an exercise in waiting for the mountain to blow as Milo deals with life as a gladiator and Cassia deals with life as a pouty face. When Vesuvius does finally go up, all attention to historic detail and continuity goes out the window.

The eruption spews up a gigantic pyroclastic cloud, which seemingly just goes away for awhile as the resort city panics and the main characters stop to fight and have angry chats. History suggests that many of the folks who died in the Pompeii eruption succumbed instantly to intensely high temperatures, yet nobody in this film complains about the heat. All things considered, they all look surprisingly comfortable for long stretches during the actual eruption.

The costuming basically looks like togas created for a middle school production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. The special effects have their moments, but the 3-D is less than spectacular, and too much of the film takes place in the dark, making it hard to follow.

This is basically an exercise in how to create characters that nobody can care about. When everybody starts getting annihilated, they are just blips on a screen rather than characters we have invested in.

And let it be said that Sutherland’s work in this film is easily the worst of his career. Yes, it’s even worse than that drunken YouTube video of him tackling a Christmas tree. Actually, that was kind of awesome, much better than anything in the wasteful, lethargic wannabe epic.

You have to be a truly bad director to make the eruption of Mount Vesuvius a non-event.