Pompeii (2014)

This was such a disaster of a disaster film, I was surprised not to see Roland Emmerich's name on it. Instead, Paul W. S. Anderson (3 "Resident Evil" films) directed this poor excuse for historical fiction, and instead of being the epic he obviously wanted it to be, it was just an epic waste of time. It took three people to write this goofy and horrifically unbelievable script, though I'm not completely positive it wasn't written by those hypothetical monkeys at their typewriters. On the bright side, everything is so lost in the cartoony CGI, that you hardly notice the scripting issue, because your eyes are busy envying blind people.

Kit Harrington is the film's lead, Milo, a Celt whose entire village is slaughtered in front him when he is child, and he later becomes a slave, forced into Gladitoring (that isn't a word!). His performance is one note, and full of complete awful. It wasn't as bad as Kellan Lutz in "Hercules" (by far the worst performance of this short year, so far), but coupled with the piss poor script, it isn't good in any way. Anderson also manages to waste a considerable amount of talent, Carrie-Anne Moss and Jared Harris among the roster. I'm not sure why Kiefer Sutherland was in this, but it surely isn't the first time he did something this far below his standards. I really wish that the Volcano scene would have happened roughly an hour and a half earlier.

Grade: D-
3D: Really, don't.
Easter Egg: No

Starring: Kit Harrington, Carrie-Anne Moss, Emily Browning
Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Writer(s): Janet Scott Batchler, Lee Batchler, Michael Robert Johnson
RT: 98 min
Rating: PG-13 for intense battle sequences, disaster-related action and brief sexual content