Do you remember that brief period when, in a desperate attempt to milk the televisual zeitgeist, every second film featured somebody or other from Mad Men? Well, it's official. Now every second film features somebody from bleeding Game of Thrones.

Kit Harrington, good-hearted bastard Jon Snow in that series, doesn't fall far from his tree in Paul W S Anderson's characteristically unsubtle attempt to construct a story round the last days of Pompeii. Using his sad face to good effect, Kit plays a Celt named, of all things, Milo.

Transported to the Roman city as a slave, Milo falls in improbable love with Emily Browning's anachronistically egalitarian noble totty. There is, in the coliseum, a battle re-enactment that appear to borrow promiscuously from Ridley Scott's Gladiator. There are romantic horse rides. There is more middle-ranking digital animation than any human could ever fear to encounter.

Some of it is entertaining on purpose: Harrington has already proved himself convincing with a sword and an angry stare. Some of it is very, very entertaining by accident: top Roman Kiefer Sutherland sounds as if he's attempting to impersonate Prince Philip while chewing a live frog.

Still, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that everybody is desperately killing time in expectation of the one big special effect that will turn them all into ageless dust. Erupt already, Vesuvius.