"Pompeii" Movie Review

        

            Director Paul W. S. Anderson gets a lot of hate. Pompeii is definitely one of the reasons why. I will go ahead and say that this movie is awful. Going into this movie I had slightly low expectations, and this film was much worse than I expected it to be. It stars Kit Harrington, Emily Browning, Kiefer. Sutherland, Carrie Anne-Moss, and Jessica Lucas.

            Because there are only two things in this entire movie that I liked, I will say them first. In one of the action sequences, I saw glimpses of a well-directed sequence. In the end, there were some shots of really cool and good-looking special effects. Those two things are the only things I liked about the movie.

            I will start off with probably the worst aspect of the film – its terrible, terrible script. This script gave a terrible story with terrible characters to with this movie. Also, the entire thing is filled to the rim with every cliché it could have with this story and just about every single line of dialogue is terrible.

            I will start off with the characters. These characters are the same characters we have already seen a hundred times. They are also dumb characters. They do incredibly stupid and laughable things. Their relationships are instant and they share no chemistry with each other. I could not connect to them and I did not care of them. The main villain is cheesy, poorly portrayed, and plain dumb. It was also completely unnecessary for there to be a villain in the first place. All the villain did was take away from the movie. I was bored with the villain’s storyline and he did not seem menacing me. He was also the usual, clichéd villain.

            The story here is extremely derivative of Titanic and Gladiator. It seems to mix the two together and they were not a good match. The two stories combine to make a very dumb and clichéd story. I am guessing you have read the word “cliché” too many times already by now. Anyway, the story is also dumb. It is very hard to believe and it is told through terrible dialogue.

            The finale of this film is the most hard-to-believe thing in the movie, too long, bloated, poorly-directed, dumb, and just too much. It mixes in an unreasonable action scene with what is already happening and it does not work. With the poor characters we have, there is no intensity felt. With the way it is directed, it is not exhilarating.

            I have said “dumb” many times and I have never really explained what I mean by it. When I say that something is dumb, it usually has to do with the way it is written and crafted. With every line of dialogue being horrible in these scenes, they come off dumb.

            Those are all of my flaws in the script, so it is not time to get to my flaws outside of the script. First off, the only times the effects are good are during the few shots I talked about at the beginning. All of the other effects looked bad. There are many, many times in this movie where I could really tell that the actors were on a green screen. And during many of the action sequences near the end, it really looked like this was on a stage.

            You would think that this is a terrible movie that could be enjoyed, right? Well, you are wrong if you do. This is an uninteresting, boring film. After about the first thirty minutes, I was bored and counting down the minutes until the film ended. I did not enjoy this movie.

            One last flaw I have with this movie is its predictability. Because this film is so clichéd, because we have seen all of this before, I predicted most of this movie. For just about every plot point, I was right, too. My entertainment watching this movie was predicting was going to happen next, but that also got boring, because I was right every time.

            Pompeii is for sure a terrible movie that I strongly urge you not to check out.
            With an awful script and awful direction, Pompeii is a dull and uninteresting, awful film that is filled to rim with clichés and has a terrible, terrible ending.