Pompeii (2014), PG-13, 1.5 stars

Kit Harrington as Milo.

This story is rather familiar, as I learned this event from school as a teenager. The event was heartily impacting and devastating as I recollect my geographical memory that Pompeii was near the volcano called Mount Vesuvius. The eruption occurred in 79 AD as the volcano blasted with specks and heavy "asteroids" of hot magma and ash. It is one of the most cataclysmic surprises in philosophical and Latin history. Unfortunately, the director is sharply focused on the spectacular visual effects and cheesy melodrama that it is basically a philosophical "Pearl Harbor".

The movie starts personally with a young boy named Milo witnessing the horror and chaos by the Romans invading his village and killing his mother and father. The evil Senator Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland) leads the attack and sees Milo's anguish and grief in front of him and orders him and the villagers to be killed. The Romans pile the bodies and Milo is believed to be dead, but, Milo escapes from the piles of bodies in order to get caught again and taken by a group of men.

17 years later, Graecus (Joe Pingue), a slave owner, is watching his gladiators fighting and is uninterested by their combat skills in the arena. He wants something exciting and has an older Milo (Kit Harrington) to enter into the arena and watches the young slave slay the three gladiators mercilessly and quickly. Graecus is amazed by his efforts.

On the way home to Pompeii, the escorted slaves and Princess Cassia's (Emily Browning) and her friend, Ariadne's (Jessica Lucas) carriage hits a bump on the road and the horse is critically injured and wailing in pain as Milo asks his slave keeper to unchain him and of course, Cassia, in a cliché of routine medieval movies, orders the slave keeper to unchain the main character and help Cassia tend to the horse's wounds. What Milo does is really stupefying and random which Cassia is impressed by mercifully killing the horse. Huh?

Harrington and Cassia (Emily Browning) in the middle of this destruction.

The story focuses on Milo's strength, Cassia's and Milo's romance, and gladiator combat throughout the whole movie but it does not accrue to the specific early goings of Mount Vesuvius. According to the tedious dialogue in the movie, all that is relevant is that "the earth is shaking" and a person replies that it is Vesuvius. And then later on, Vesuvius erupts. My point is that the filmmakers did not know what the whole movie was about or what they were trying to do with this historical material.

Kit Harrington is just sleepwalking through the role for the whole audience, mainly women, to gaze at his six-pack and muscles. He was just OK in the role and he was nowhere near close to memorable in comparison to Russell Crowe's performance in Gladiator. Emily Browning has no chemistry with Harrington as far as I'm concerned. Although, the romantic dialogue and melodrama is unbearable and a bit dull to watch. The rest of the cast try their best, but the characters are copied from Gladiator. Think about it. There's a gladiator named Atticus (Adewale Akkinouye-Agbaje) who is a kind colored gladiator who sees Milo's talents as a gladiator and is basically the third well throughout the movie. Then, you have the jealous villain and the slave-keeper and the parents.

There are aspects of this movie I did like that which are some of the visual effects and a bit of the corny gladiator choreography, but since it's a PG-13 epic, this is a bloodless movie with not much energy and narrative in the material. Director Paul S.W. Anderson created a clumsy cliché-riddled movie with not much enthusiasm in the material. I wanted more and better dialogue about Mount Vesuvius. As I saw the credits roll down, I made a face palm and I thought to myself that if I had not learned about this material in my youth, maybe, I could have embraced this film as a guilty pleasure. However, this movie was tiresome and again, clumsy, that I could not accept it as a "movie that is so bad, it is good."

*1/2