Why waste money on 3D when the characters and the story are 1D? What annoys me the most is that all those ravishing effects (and I didn't even see it in 3D) were spent on nothing. Pompeji and its destruction is such a great backdrop for drama, but here it was all sacrificed for a string of predictable clichés. While being excruciatingly bored during "Pompeji," my mind wandered back to "San Francisco" from 1936 with Jeanette MacDonald, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. By the time the earthquake struck near the end of that old film, I was so engrossed in the plot and the characters that I had almost forgotten about the disaster and didn't mind at all that it looked very much like what it was: a lot of papier-mâché. In "Pompeji," the plot and the characters were so tiresome that I was looking forward to Vesuvius putting an end to my sufferings. Notwithstanding the spectacular special effects, "Pompeji" is indeed a disaster movie but in the wrong sense of the word. The silliest stuff that ever I saw.
