George Green

Complete waste of an amazing opportunity. I’ll elaborate on that in a sec If you want a gladiator-like action film with cool explosions that requires very little attention to watch, this is the film for you, it does have good fight scenes and the acting matches the budget. The issue for me is the plot. It's basically gladiator based in Pompeii for the politics and action, with a smidge of Romeo and Juliet for the romantic star crossed lovers trope. They played it VERY safe. And there’s nothing wrong with these plot lines on their own (unoriginal as they are) but they completely clash with the eruption at the end! The carnage of the event is constantly put on hold for romantic moments and fight scenes to the point that it’s laughable, as if the eruption and impending doom momentarily hasn’t phased any of the characters at all. The main issue though is when the eruption takes place you feel absolutely no emotional attachment for the people of Pompeii, in fact there are only around half a dozen characters we are actually told to care about. The most we see of the people of Pompeii is when they are sitting in the arena watching people kill each other for their own entertainment, so when they’re all killed by the eruption (spoilers obviously) it’s really hard to feel bad about it. Why not have a plot that shows a slice of life of the average citizens in the city, like titanic? It’s a tried and tested successful plot format, the setting would make the concept original enough, you can still have your romantic trope so why did they have to make it an action movie instead of a more emotive representation of what happened? It completely detracts from what Pompeii is known for. What’s amazing is the film actually opens with written first hand quotes from Pliny, a historical scholar who lived through Pompeii so it opens with the expectation that we are going to get to experience the true terror of the eruption… but no, we get sword fights while the plot tries to wrap all the conflicts up in spite of the actual reason you came to watch the movie. My final point (spoilers) is that their choice to have the two star crossed lovers both not make it, could have worked, had it not been built on having the protagonist fight and kill the antagonist to escape, what’s the point of the good guys killing the bad guys if in the end it has absolutely no bearing on the outcome? They might as well have lost to the big bad and then have the bad guys killed by the eruption, that would have at least been a more interesting take or better yet, just remove the action altogether, it’s pointless, distracting and overused.

It would be one star but the deaths were imaginative and well executed and there were a couple of moments that made me chuckle. Overall the writing was ridiculously lazy, clunky and obvious, the desperate shoehorning of political messages was very distracting and typical of the current Hollywood climate. There was some basic development around the protagonist however the motivations behind the serial killer was non existent, in fact everything about them was simple plot convenience. And don’t get me started on the plot. So predictable the last half hour was physically uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be there watching it but I was watching it with the gf and they were enjoying it. The only part that wasn’t predictable was the ending but that because the writers seemed to want to push the lazy boundaries a bit more and just go full inexplicable. (Spoilers) the bad guy was already dead… why bring him back without any explanation just to give the character a one liner that she could have got in during the final fight. Could have been better but the writers were shockingly bad on this one