Anderson's take on the Pompeii story is basically TV's Spartacus via Dante's Peak, with inevitable disaster-hits nods to Titanic, Deep Impact and The Day After Tomorrow. There is one wonderful arena-battle set piece, and the actual eruption/disaster sequences are ambitious if familiar, yet the budget is stretched thinly enough to make a lot of the CGI visuals unconvincing and unengaging. Kit Harington and Emily Browning make for extremely lightweight Jack-and-Rose leads, a deadly combination with the film's comic-strip-level dialogue, and Kiefer Sutherland's arch cod-English thesping is one step from pantomime villain, but the mighty Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje provides some gravitas and Carrie-Anne Moss finds some humanity in a throwaway role. For such an historic and awe-inspiring story, this is a surprisingly limp film to sit through.
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