Review of Pompeii (2014) by Wesley W — 21 Jan 2015

Another terrible effort at a feature film from Paul W.S. Anderson. Pompeii was full of things that make a bad movie and throughout it, it was clear to me that the filmmakers didn't care. It was full of bland acting from everybody, a dull cliche story, forgettable as hell characters, and really sub-par visual effects.

Kit Harington comes off as a bland lead character and he barely showed any emotion at all in the entire movie. Kiefer Sutherland and Emily Browning were god awful here and have presented some of the worst acting I have seen in 2014.

Carrie-Anne Moss who I loved in films such as The Matrix and Memento is completely wasted here and her exit from the movie left me wandering why she even bothered being there in the first place. The story here takes elements from other movies and just puts together scenes seen in multiple other more superior movies.

Why does Paul W.S. Anderson keep making movies? About every one of his films are mediocre, stupid, and just plain bland and Pompeii fits perfectly in that category. The middle of the movie I felt was really boring because characters were just discussing things that didn't matter to the plot and I just kept wandering when it would get any better and it never did.

When the volcano finally erupted, some of the effects looked decent, but most of the time, they looked cheap and poorly put together. The green screen when characters would ride horses with the destruction in the background looked really obvious and fake.

When a character perished, I didn't care one bit and I was just waiting for the movie to be over with. I will only give it one star because some of the visual effects looked decent and I did like the score of the movie.

Overall, just skip this film because it is not worth your time and if you want to see a better volcano movie watch Dante's Peak, I found that movie to be underrated and the acting and effects were actually solid in it.