Release Date: 02/21/2014
A slave turned gladiator finds himself in a race against time to save his true love, who has been betrothed to a corrupt Roman Senator. As Mount Vesuvius erupts, he must fight to save his beloved as Pompeii crumbles around him.
I wanted the ceiling to be higher. I really did. But seeing Paul W.S. Anderson's name associated with a project dooms it more than Michael Bay's. The director who's brought us such as gems as AVP: Alien vs. Predator (you used both the acronym and the longform in the same movie title? Is that even allowed?) and Mortal Kombat, just can't do better than a 3. It's important not to confuse him with Paul Thomas Anderson, who's actually a great director. Anyway, true story: I put the best case scenario at 3.5, read his filmography again, and lowered it to a 3. He's that bad. I can't stop thinking this project was tailor-made for Roland Emmerich. How is the king of the disaster movie not directing this?! And who keeps thinking it's a good idea to give Paul W.S. Anderson $100 million to make movies (have I mentioned he's awful?)?
The signs are all there that will this will make people look back fondly on 2012 (possibly the all-time champion for becoming outdated the fastest). You have Kit Harrington, whose always-present slightly agape expression works perfectly for the constantly befuddled Jon Snow ("Game of Thrones"), but I can't imagine being a good look on a movie's protagonist. On a larger scale, this thing is stuffed to the gills with B- and C-listers, and if you have a $100 million Roman movie you can't sell to a topflight star, there's something about the script or the director (he's awful) that's turning them off.
We know there's going to be a love story between Harrington and Emily Browning, who I've been waiting to take off after Sucker Punch, but there's nothing in the trailer to suggest it will be more than the standard "lower class boy falls in love with upper class girl" fare. The entire plot pre-eruption will stand on a knife's edge, since who cares about the mundane when a volcano's about to explode? The trailer also introduces us to the requisite friends who will inevitably die in the tragedy: Jessica Lucas for Browning and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje for Harrington. How nice for the movie's math to be so easy to follow! At the same time, it's a Roman movie and the disaster scenes seem to have some pretty above-average CGI, so it can't dip too far. Just like the xenomorph and Predator saved AVP from being an all-time terrible movie just by their inclusion, it looks like Anderson will be saved from a complete clunker, yet again, by things the movie intrinsically had before he signed on.
Between the have-and-have-not love story and the impending natural disaster looming over the beginning of the film, this looks like its best hope is to be a poor man's Titanic. Drop from stars Leo to Harrington and Winslet to Browning, and from director Cameron (way down) to Anderson. All this thing needs is a budget-Celine-Dion to sing a terrible song, and the imitation will be complete. The whole thing feels like a movie made the wrong way: a producer got an idea, and then a writer and director were hired to flesh it out. The four writers hardly inspire confidence, with one having written the screenplay for Sherlock Holmes (and nothing else until this), two not having written anything in the last ten years, and the only one with a healthy résumé is only credited as a writer (an important distinction from an actual screenplay credit). I should probably set the floor even lower for the film given everything I know about it, but for the sheer entertainment of the eruption itself (is it OK to be entertained guilt-free by a disaster of that magnitude almost 2000 years later?), 1.5 seems like the absolute lowest it could go.
The signs are all there that will this will make people look back fondly on 2012 (possibly the all-time champion for becoming outdated the fastest). You have Kit Harrington, whose always-present slightly agape expression works perfectly for the constantly befuddled Jon Snow ("Game of Thrones"), but I can't imagine being a good look on a movie's protagonist. On a larger scale, this thing is stuffed to the gills with B- and C-listers, and if you have a $100 million Roman movie you can't sell to a topflight star, there's something about the script or the director (he's awful) that's turning them off.
We know there's going to be a love story between Harrington and Emily Browning, who I've been waiting to take off after Sucker Punch, but there's nothing in the trailer to suggest it will be more than the standard "lower class boy falls in love with upper class girl" fare. The entire plot pre-eruption will stand on a knife's edge, since who cares about the mundane when a volcano's about to explode? The trailer also introduces us to the requisite friends who will inevitably die in the tragedy: Jessica Lucas for Browning and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje for Harrington. How nice for the movie's math to be so easy to follow! At the same time, it's a Roman movie and the disaster scenes seem to have some pretty above-average CGI, so it can't dip too far. Just like the xenomorph and Predator saved AVP from being an all-time terrible movie just by their inclusion, it looks like Anderson will be saved from a complete clunker, yet again, by things the movie intrinsically had before he signed on.
Between the have-and-have-not love story and the impending natural disaster looming over the beginning of the film, this looks like its best hope is to be a poor man's Titanic. Drop from stars Leo to Harrington and Winslet to Browning, and from director Cameron (way down) to Anderson. All this thing needs is a budget-Celine-Dion to sing a terrible song, and the imitation will be complete. The whole thing feels like a movie made the wrong way: a producer got an idea, and then a writer and director were hired to flesh it out. The four writers hardly inspire confidence, with one having written the screenplay for Sherlock Holmes (and nothing else until this), two not having written anything in the last ten years, and the only one with a healthy résumé is only credited as a writer (an important distinction from an actual screenplay credit). I should probably set the floor even lower for the film given everything I know about it, but for the sheer entertainment of the eruption itself (is it OK to be entertained guilt-free by a disaster of that magnitude almost 2000 years later?), 1.5 seems like the absolute lowest it could go.