Excellent special effects and solid exciting sequences carry the day as Mount Vesuvius and howlers erupt in “Pompeii,’’ a campy guilty pleasure that serves up a “Gladiator’’ knockoff as an appetizer to the impressively flame-filled main course.
Kit Harington of HBO’s “Game of Thrones’’ may lack the gravitas of Russell Crowe, but sports newly acquired six-pack abs as Milo, a slave/gladiator whose parents are slaughtered in “the rebellion of the Celtic horse tribes’’ in “Britannia, A.D. 62.’’
Seventeen years later, on the way to Pompeii, Milo impresses the beautiful young aristocrat Cassia (Emily Browning of the unfortunate “Sucker Punch’’) with his skills as a horse whisperer.
Unfortunately, Cassia is being pursued as a wife by dastardly Roman senator Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland, trying to outdo his dad Donald’s villainy in “The Hunger Games’’), who was responsible for the death of Milo’s parents. Corvus’ idea of courtship is to promise Cassia that “I will break your will.’’
Another acting scion, Jared Harris of “Mad Men’’ (whose late dad Richard played the murdered emperor in “Gladiator’’), turns up to exclaim things like “By Juno’s tit!’’ He’s Cassia’s businessman father, who needs Corvus’ financial backing to replace Pompeii’s crumbling (little does he know), century-old stadium.
The gladiator battles that serve as the warm-up for the apocalypse are effectively staged by the team responsible for “300,’’ even if the fighters’ entrance into the arena makes them look a bit like the chorus line in a Broadway musical.
The acting is better than serviceable, with standout work by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, outdoing Djimon Hounsou in “Gladiator’’ as a fierce black gladiator who is happy to lay down his life for our white hero in the end (Cassia has a female slave who performs a similar function in a collapsing villa).
All hell breaks loose at about the one-hour mark, and it’s clear that most of the reported $100 million budget went for special effects, including an elaborately handsome re-creation of Pompeii that’s spectacularly laid to waste in ways that would shame even Hollywood master of disaster Roland Emmerich.
Accompanied by a throbbing Clinton Shorter score, “Pompeii’’ doesn’t miss a cliché of the genre, except maybe for toppling giant statues. Volcanic ash, flaming bursts of lava, a tsunami that pushes boats through the streets — it all works remarkably well, except for a phony-looking climactic chariot race.
Without giving anything away, this German-Canadian co-production directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (the endless “Resident Evil’’ franchise) has a modern-day coda that got more laughs at the preview I attended than any comedy this year. And when was the last time you saw a movie that opened with a quote from Pliny the Younger?