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Pompeii

Director: Paul WS Anderson (2014)

There’s not an ounce of originality in this ridiculous Roman romp – but you can’t help being swept away on waves of lava-hot fun.

It shamelessly borrows scenes, images, fights and even jokes from Ridley Scott’s epic Gladiator despite not being fit to tie its sandals.

Pompeii is also poorly acted and badly written, with ramshackle dialogue and a plot that makes very little sense.

But Geordie director Anderson doesn’t waste time in getting to the main act – Mt Vesuvius blowing its top.

As choking-hot death rains down on Romans in an orgy of brilliant and gleeful destruction, I was grinning like a loon.

Plus it has Keifer Sutherland camping it up as a Roman Senator so resolutely evil that he has a English accent. (At least I think it’s supposed to be an English accent.)

The plot follows a Celtic – that is, British – child Milo who is captured after his family is butchered by Roman legionaries. lead by the evil Corvus (Sutherland).

Suddenly it’s 17 years later and he’s has grown up to become a feared gladiator known simply as ‘The Celt’ (Kit Harington) with the baddest rep, hardest abs and best hair.

Before you can say Maximus Decimus Meridius he is whisked off to Pompeii to fight in a computer-drawn city of unconvincing interior sets.

Milos falls in love with beautiful bland party-girl Cassia (Emily Browning). Her father Severus (Jared Harris) wants Corvus (now a Senator) to finance a new arena. But Corvus wants Cassia as part of the deal and plots to have Milo murdered.

Milos foils Corvus’s bid to kill him with the help of gladiator Atticus (Adewele Akinnouye-Agbaje). With the hero’s fate in the balance, the volcano erupts and everyone legs it for the docks to escape.

Except Milo, who must rescue Cassia, get revenge on Corvus and avoid being turned into ash with everyone else.

★★★☆☆

Focus

Director: Glenn Ficarra & John Requa (2015)

Using the glossy glow of its stars and dazzling colour palette, this stupid and sexist heist movie tries to distract our focus from its failings.

In a buddy movie without a buddy, there’s no intelligence, danger, tension, fun or sexual frisson. Jokes fall flat from a 1980’s throwback of a script with Will Smith‘s once assured delivery the most culpable.

With no-one to riff off he delivers an unusually tired performance from a self-satisfied script. It works like patchwork not clockwork and seems stitched together from other films, all better than this one.

Incompetent pickpocket Jess (Margot Robbie) fails to hustle super-slick conman Nicky (Smith). It’s hard to tell whether Jess is playing dumb or simply dumb.

Nicky explains that a successful con relies like a magic trick on distracting the victim’s focus. One of his cons is strikingly similar to the work of British illusionist Derren Brown.

Persuading Nicky to mentor her, Jess joins his huge crew of high-living con-men as they fleece unsuspecting tourists in New Orleans. We’re supposed to be impressed by their flash tricks as they callously steal wallets, cameras, phones and watches from ordinary people.

Jess and Nicky share an over-abundance of banter but no chemistry and can’t keep their hands off each other.

There’s an interlude at an American football game which has no relevance to the rest of the story. It does at least have an entertaining performance from BD Wong as the wealthy gambler Liyuan.

Characters such as Nicky’s right hand man Horst (Brennan Brown) are written in and out on a whim and act without comprehensible motivation.

After making a huge stash of cash, Nicky abruptly terminates their relationship for no explained reason and abandons her at the airport, albeit with a considerable financial advantage.

Three years later in Argentina, Nicky is hired by racing car team boss Garriga (Rodrigo Santoro) to indulge in a little corporate skulduggery.

In the close knit world of professional racing Nicky pretends to be a disgruntled engineer defecting with technical secrets to the opposition, ran by boorish Australian McEwen (Robert Taylor).

However when Jess turns up as Garriga’s girlfriend Nicky must confront his feelings for her, threatening the big con.

We’re given no reason to like the lead characters other than they’re insanely glamorous. He has a vaguely troubled personal history and she’s avoided becoming a prostitute. Far from being a romance the most important relationship is between Nicky and his father.

Nicky is always presented as powerful; wearing shades and suits while leaning out of soft-top cars. Jess suffers the camera leering over her as she parades in bikini and heels.

The coarse and laugh-free dialogue has Nicky spouting science says women are easily persuaded by soft words and trinkets. He stalks, seduces and exploits Jess before reducing her to being a nurse with a meal ticket.

Jess is possibly the only female with a speaking role.

It ends with an astonishingly predictable sting in the tail stolen from a far superior couple of con-men.

★☆☆☆☆

Rush

Director: Ron Howard (2013)

Roaring into the cinema is this amazing racing tale fuelled by testosterone, booze and occasionally petrol.

It charts James Hunt and Nikki Lauda’s rivalry as they race from Formula 3 to challenging for the F1 world title in 1976.

Both men have similar backgrounds of wealth and privilege – Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) is a champagne-quaffing show-off who sees racing as an extension of his social life. While Lauda (Daniel Brühl) is a yoghurt-eating Austrian who is arrogant, risk-averse and highly focused. He races because it offers huge financial rewards.

Each describes the other as assholes but only Lauda seems sufficiently self-aware to realise the term applies to both men equally.

The film creates great tension by focusing on the friction between the two men which is then released by the starter’s flag. The thrilling races are expertly staged, especially as they show how close stewards and spectators were to these ‘bombs on wheels’.

Among the parties, insults and weddings, Lauda suffers a near fatal crash that leaves him scarred yet defiantly he continues to race to the film’s gripping climax.

In this macho mechanical world the ladies fare badly; being married is seen as being incompatible with success and single women are disposable sex toys.

Sadly Hemsworth’s acting is hamstrung by the demands of maintaining an English accent and is at his best behind the wheel. Brühl is more convincing and the supporting cast are all excellent.

The film offers an great insight into the world of 1970s Formula 1. Smoking is allowed in the pit-lanes, rain is a common enemy and the drivers have to battle mechanical failure, financial disaster, personal demons, media interference and the politics of the racing authorities.

It’s a well-crafted story of competitive courage that’s told with humour and energy.

★★★★☆

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Director:  Jonathan Liebesman (2014)

Crawling out of New York sewers after a seven year hibernation these turtles really stink.

This is a damnably dull and witless reboot of a dormant franchise cobbled together with the least possible inspiration.

The plot, for what it’s worth, follows ambitious TV reporter April O’Neil (Megan Fox) as she teams up with the four mutant turtles to thwart criminal samurai Shredder and his Foot Clan gang’s plan to rule New York.

O’Neil is unwittingly used as bait by the clan to catch a vigilante who foils a dockside heist. The vigilante turns out to the four computer animated kickass turtles – Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael, voiced by Johnny Knoxville, Noel Fisher, Jeremy Howard and Alan Ritchson.

The quartet were raised in the sewers by the giant mutated rat and sensei master Splinter (Tony Shalhoub). They squabble, eat pizza, say ‘Cowabunga!’ and wear colour coded masks. Michelangelo is the most easily identifiable because he’s the most annoying.

April recognises them as the turtles she kept in her dad’s lab before he died in a mysterious fire. He was developing a mutagen that would eradicate disease. Luckily she kept all his scientific notes.

She tells her dad’s ex-partner turned industrialist Eric Sacks (William Fichtner) but he’s now in cahoots with Shredder and planning to use the turtles’ mutated blood to blackmail the city.

There are fights, chases, rocket launchers, exploding cars and remote controlled flying daggers. The film is sufficiently self-aware to be happy in pointing out how ridiculous it all is – but it’s the sloppy execution not the premise that’s the problem.

In another film Fox’s expressionless face and lack of dramatic range would be a severe hindrance – but here they’re just part of the overall ooze of ineptitude.

Mutants, ninjas and turtles all deserve better than this – probably teenagers as well.

★☆☆☆☆