0
New York Daily News by Joe Neumaier
It’s impossible to find anything that grabs you in Pompeii. This lumpen adventure with a misguided romance buries anything in the disaster-flick genre that might have been a blast.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
35
The first sixty minutes of Pompeii are awful, bordering on unwatchable... The final forty-five minutes of the movie however are, by sheer force of will, irrefutably entertaining. At least there’s raining death in the form of fireballs smashing up the place.
30
The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer
While Anderson excels in the film’s many moments of digital doom-and-gloom, he can’t deliver a single authentic emotion between the two star-crossed leads, leaving us with a sooty aftertaste of having sat through one very loud rendition of Titanic in togas.
40
Pompeii just feels like an excuse to rain digital terror on screaming extras. There’s much to see here, but little to feel, and even less to remember.
8
The Playlist by Kevin Jagernauth
When you plunk down your $12, you will get the destruction you were promised. But it's too bad it's such a repetitive, unengaging, glaringly digital experience and worse than that, you'll have to sit through the disaster that is the rest of movie.
25
San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle
If you think of Pompeii as a ride, a conveyance for special effects, and not anything resembling an emotional experience, indifference can almost be a good thing.
60
While more coherent than much of Anderson’s recent work, the film proves less successful at combining destruction and damsel-in-distress storytelling within the same frame, serving up blurry images of Milo trying to rescue Cassia while the city crumbles around them.
25
Slant Magazine by R. Kurt Osenlund
Shockingly, the violent release of smoke, fire, and meteoric debris is positioned more as a climactic afterthought than as the main attraction.
50
Miami Herald by Rene Rodriguez
The movie is so grand in scale that you can’t help surrender to the spectacle, even if the stuff that’s going on with the people in the film is often close to risible.
63
McClatchy-Tribune News Service by Roger Moore
What Anderson delivers this one time is a genuine spectacle, a gladiator movie with a volcano in the middle of it.