He mightn’t be reprising Jack Bauer anytime soon, but Kiefer Sutherland will be…. oh, heck, does that say Paul W.S Anderson!?

Seems so.

The “24″, “Touch” and “Chicago Joe and the Showgirl” (snigger) star is in talks to play the rogue in “Pompei”, the new film from “Resident Evil” and “Alien vs. Predator” virtuoso Anderson.

Described as a “disaster movie” (likely not the first time you’ll hear those words in reference to the flick, since Anderson’s helming), “Pompei” is set in 79 A.D. in the days before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, one of history’s great disasters.

Kit Harrington is “a slave stuck on a ship who must race against time to save his true love, his master’s daughter, as well as his best friend, a gladiator trapped in the coliseum when the destruction begins”, says THR.

Sutherland, a dab hand at playing villains, “will play a Roman senator who enslaved Harington’s village. The scheming senator forces the merchant to give his daughter’s hand in marriage to him.”

As nervous as Anderson projects make most of us, Sutherland is usually pretty terrific – especially when he’s playing bad guys; who can forget the man’s malicious turns in the likes of “The Lost Boys”, “Phone Booth”, “A Few Good Men”, “A Time to Kill”, “At Close Range” and “Stand by Me”, in which he bet those poor tykes to the body.

Hopefully ‘Bauer’ is enough to ‘save’ “Pompei”.