Kit Harington (Game of Thrones) plays Milo, a hunky-sensitive slave/gladiator whose family was slaughtered during a Celtic uprising by Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland), a brutal Roman general who later becomes a smug senator. Harington is pretty in an Abercrombie model kind of way, and his boyish features and peach fuzz beard don’t do much to lend weight and gravity to a character who has supposedly been beaten into a hardened state of perpetual violence by the life inflicted on him by the evil Romans. He constantly scowls under furrowed brow, but never builds up the requisite heat needed to sell the character. His good looks and still intact sense of decency (epitomized in his special ability to calm horses) catch the dewy doe eyes of Cassia (Emily Browning), the daughter of Pompeii’s leader, Severus (Jared Harris). Of course, they can’t really be together because she is the equivalent of a princess and he is a slave, but just as Romeo and Juliet couldn’t be kept apart (nor Jack and Rose, for that matter), their paths keep converging even as Corvus pursues her to be his trophy wife and that volcano keeps glowering in the background.

There are plenty of plot strands involving Cassia’s parents (her mother is played by Carrie-Anne Moss) and their desire to appease the Romans, Milo’s burgeoning friendship with fellow gladiator Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), and Milo’s flouncy owner Graecus (Joe Pingue), who clearly likes both snails and oysters, but none of it really matters because Anderson is clearly anxious to get to the big climax and let the fire rain down. And rain down it does. Clunky and derivative as the film’s first half is, it is almost redeemed by Anderson’s grand orchestration of volcanic destruction, as little insinuations of the disaster to come in the form of growing cracks in the walls and rumbling in the earth give way to buildings collapsing, the ground cracking open, and the gaping maw of a mountain in the background erupting in fully fury, spitting hundreds of flaming rocks at the titular city before engulfing it in both fire and water, courtesy of a massive tidal wave generating by the shaking of the ground. It’s like Anderson studied every disaster movie ever made and tried to incorporate at least one element of natural violence from each to ensure that death comes in every form imaginable: burning, crushing, drowning, falling—you name it, someone suffers it. The effects work is generally outstanding, and the visual nature of the eruption and the way it blankets the sky with ash and makes Pompeii into a kind of hell on earth has a genuine visual conviction that sticks with you.

But, every time you sense the movie really getting into a groove, Anderson has to push it too far, particularly in a ludicrous chase through the burning city as Corvus chains Cassia to his chariot and races off with Milo in fast pursuit behind him. The chase is silly in its own right (especially when we’re asked to believe that Cassia can pick an iron lock with a splinter of wood), but then Anderson has to throw in a moment when a building collapses and you’re supposed to think Oh, no, Milo has been crushed! just before he explodes out of an ash cloud as the music soars on the soundtrack. Cue eye rolling.

To be fair, the violence of the eruption and the destruction of Pompeii builds enough intensity into the story that Anderson comes close to earning his final images of Milo and Cassia holding each other in an open field, finally freed of all the social and legal shackles that have kept them apart, as the fiery ash cloud races toward them in the background. It is a vision that is very nearly iconic, and had the first half the film had been more emotionally engaging and less distractingly derivative of much better films, Pompeii might have very well have earned a place among the great pop art evocations of doomed love.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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