POMPEII (M)
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Stars:Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje,
Kit Harington, Emily Browning
Director:Paul W.S. Anderson
Screening:general release
Rating:★★
IN a disaster movie, all’s well that doesn’t end well. It’s the only genre in which we expect the whole thing to go up in smoke. The ship will sink, the building will burn, the volcano will erupt.
We go to see how people react to a stressful event; actually, we go to see how well they die. This becomes uplifting because it’s not us. Thus, we are like those who watched the Christians fight the lions in the Roman Colosseum (if they ever did – there is some doubt).
In Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii, we are offered both ancient and modern spectacle – and in 3D. Much of the film is about gladiators slugging it out in Pompeii’s arena for our enjoyment. Then Mt Vesuvius goes bang and everyone gets punished for the sin of watching slaves kill each other for entertainment.
The film is its own self-criticism, a meta-disaster movie, although I’m not sure the criticism goes far enough. When you find yourself wishing the lava would hurry up and engulf the city sooner, the movie is in trouble.
Kit Harington, a 27-year-old British actor with a rippling set of abdominals, plays Milo aka the Celt, the best young gladiator to have come out of Londinium since Bulldog Davey Boy Smith (look him up). Milo has been groomed to a life of savagery after the Romans killed his family. An early bout shows his skills: seven gladiators die in a whirlwind of blows and the Limey crowd is on its feet. It’s like world championship wrestling with more blood. He’s too good for the provinces so his owner drags him to Pompeii.
If you’re noticing a slight similarity to the plot of Gladiator, you’d be wrong. It’s the same plot, with added seasoning from the original Spartacus.
Milo shares a cell with Atticus, an African gladiator played by the impressively named Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. This man has to survive one more fight to earn his freedom. It’s like Woody Strode and Kirk Douglas all over again, with Kiefer Sutherland as the nasty Roman senator, a role occupied by Laurence Olivier in Spartacus.
Pompeii is also a romance, of course, with the Australian actress Emily Browning as headstrong beauty Cassia, in love with Milo but battling the attentions of the senator. Vesuvius glowers over this soap opera, awaiting its cue.
Given the vivid horror of what happened at Pompeii in AD79, it’s odd that there aren’t a lot more movies about this event. Modern visual effects allow a director of imagination to create scenes of extraordinary reality and impact.
British-born Anderson (Alien v Predator, four Resident Evil movies) is not that director. There is nothing memorable about Pompeii, except the gladiatorial scenes in the big arena.
Anderson is no worse than most. Action directors all use the same tricks: extreme slow motion, extreme close-up, helicopter shots for grandeur, flashbacks, dialogue that makes you wince or guffaw.
No one expects Kubrickian quality from an Anderson film and in that sense the movie does not disappoint. It’s an average modern actioner: driven by technology, careless of the past, casually insulting to the audience, mindless in its violence. Vesuvius 1, movie-lovers nil.
I, FRANKENSTEIN (M)
Stars: Aaron Eckhart, Bill Nighy, Bruce Spence
Director: Stuart Beattie
Screening: general release
Rating: ★★
Review by JAKE WILSON
THIS monotonous B-movie has only the loosest connection with any previous Frankenstein film, let alone Mary Shelley’s original novel.
Written and directed by Australia’s Stuart Beattie – adapting a comic book by Kevin Grevioux, creator of the Underworld franchise – it’s a blissfully incoherent Gothic action-fantasy, a genre which another Australian director Alex Proyas more or less invented in the 1990s with Dark City and The Crow.
An Australian-US co-production shot in Melbourne, the film is set in a nameless, stateless metropolis where cathedrals and abandoned warehouses abound and everything is mysteriously bathed in blue light. Only in occasional, uncanny moments does this world appear to intersect in any way with our own.
Centuries after his creation, Frankenstein’s monster – played by Aaron Eckhart, blandly handsome beneath his prosthetic scars – has become embroiled in an ancient war between noble gargoyles and evil winged demons, waged literally above the heads of humankind. Both sides are searching for Victor Frankenstein’s original journal, which contains the secret of bringing the dead to life.
Beattie has neither the talent nor the budget to match Proyas visually, though he does manage the occasional flourish befitting a universe where anything can happen: one sequence ends with Eckhart’s virtually indestructible monster leaping through a glass window and falling straight into the subway, where he lands atop a moving train. The demons, when slain, have a trick of erupting in fiery swirls and then collapsing into shards; Beattie must be fond of this effect, since he uses it in every second scene.
As far as acting is concerned, the film belongs by default to Bill Nighy, doing his Bill Nighy thing as a demon who poses as a mad scientist: a raised eyebrow here, a suggestive pause there, a barely perceptible sway of the hips as if he were about to step nonchalantly onto the dance floor.
There’s a fine line between making a performance look effortless and simply putting in no effort, but it’s pleasant to catch up with Nighy at any time – especially when he’s sharing the screen with the equally lanky and eccentric Bruce Spence, an Australian icon who deserves to appear in a Guillermo del Toro film before the end of his career.
