Pompeii (2014)

Pompeii arrives in the grand tradition of the historical disaster romance, a genre that has never pretended to carry the weight of its own subject matter. Paul W. S. Anderson stages the eruption of Vesuvius with genuine technical care and surrounds it with a love story, a gladiator rivalry, and a sneering senator who exists chiefly to be incinerated. The film wants to entertain. It does so with a straight face and a fireball budget, asking nothing of the audience beyond two hours of attention.

The casting offers a Black gladiator, Atticus, played with real dignity by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who becomes the film's moral center and earns his freedom in the final reel. This is diversity of presence, not of argument. The film never comments on it, which keeps the representation modest. Cassia, the merchant's daughter, defies a forced marriage, saves two men with a thumbs-up, and frees herself from her captor, gestures of agency that sit awkwardly beside the fact that her function is to be rescued and kissed. The historical record bends slightly to accommodate modern tastes in dress and demeanor, though the film rewrites no ideology and preaches nothing. There is no lecture here. The slaves suffer, the elites scheme, and the volcano settles all accounts without a single speech about the systems that produced them.

What remains is a film of conventional pleasures: chariots, lava, a doomed embrace preserved in plaster. Its progressive gestures are decorative, applied like set dressing, and it seems content to leave them there. I found this neither offensive nor invigorating. I found it, as I find most of these exercises, a sturdy piece of craftsmanship with no opinions worth reporting.