This silly, derivative but cheerfully enjoyable sword'n'sandal disaster movie is based on the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 which famously engulfed the town of Pompeii, heartrendingly entombing its residents' last moments for ever.

The Kate'n'Leo roles are taken by Emily Browning, who is comely Lady Cassia, a young noblewoman disgusted with Rome's dissolute cynicism and cruelty, and Kit Harington, playing Milo, the hunkily courageous gladiator-slave with whom she falls in love. Kiefer Sutherland plays the arrogant Roman senator (with a drawling Brit accent, of course, despite the fact that he spends some of his time actually tyrannising Britannia); Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje plays fellow gladiator Atticus and Jared Harris and Carrie-Anne Moss are Cassia's poor old mum and dad. They are all destined to be swept into a tide of smoking lava, a premonition of Rome's hubris and downfall.

This toga-ripping, pec-flexing romance is very different from the more bookish and cerebral approach taken by British author Robert Harris in his 2003 novel Pompeii, whose projected screen version from Roman Polanski was abandoned. The bread-and-circus games sequence is outrageously pinched from the great Russell Crowe epic, and the whole thing isn't exactly teeming with originality. But director Paul WS Anderson (known for the Resident Evil movies) punches it over with gusto and it's undoubtedly watchable.

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