Poseidon is a tepid, detached, derivative, boring, silly, banal, unimaginative, stupid little film. It will probably make $160 million by the end of the summer. The movie feels more like a made-for-TV Sci-fi Channel disaster flick like Deep Shock or Descent than an actual theatrical film.
Poseidon
1 & 1/2 Stars
rogue wave – relatively large and spontaneous ocean surface waves which can sink even large ships and ocean liners; they are more concisely defined as waves that are more than double the significant wave heigh, which is itself defined as the mean of the largest third of waves in a wave record. Once thought to be only legendary, they are now known to be a natural (although relatively rare – except in Hollywood) ocean phenomenon. (Wikipedia)
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| They couldn’t even get the poster right side up. That’s a clue. |
On a perfect night at sea a rogue wave hits the unsuspecting luxury ocean liner capsizing it without warning (no change in wind, weather, or radar). Well…there is a slight warning in the deck officer’s declaration, “Listen. Do you feel that?” in the paraphrasing of the classic Ghostbusters line. As the ship overturns and slowly (and I mean slooooowly) begins to sink the Captain (Andre Braugher) tries to keep those passengers in lounge together to wait it out until they are rescued. Well, where’s the fun in that?
A group led by former firefighter and politician Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell dusting off his role from Backdraft) and the MacGyver-ish poker shark Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas) decide to go and find Ramsey’s cute, spunky, and irascible daughter (Emmy Rossum who already survived The Day After Tomorrow so what’s a little water compared to that?) and her meat-head fiance (Mike Vogel) and try to make it to the surface.
Also tagging along are a stowaway (Mia Maestro), a mother (Jacinda Barrett) and her young son (Jimmy Bennett), an asshole (Kevin Dillon doing a dead-on impersonation of his brother’s role in There’s Something About Mary for reasons that are never entirely clear), and an elderly gay architect (Richard Dreyfuss, who has survived aliens, giant sharks, gunmen, and Another Stakeout and this is his reward?).
Where, oh where, to begin? The entire “adventure” of this odd group climbing up an overturned ship is about as interesting as watching paint dry. There’s no excitement or thrills here and to call the writing bad doesn’t do justice to the word. It’s so mind-numbingly boring that in less than twenty minutes you’re rooting for the ship to sink to kill everyone.
Not to mention the fact that when the ship finally does start to sink and stern of the boat goes into the air the group continues to move forward (after a few falling chairs and moving furniture and water) in the exact same path as they were moving before. See the problem the makers of the film obviously missed? Think about it like this: walk around your house and imagine if you could tilt it 90 degrees in the air. After that could you still walk down the hallway or would you have to, I don’t know, CLIMB?!!!!
As for the characters they are simply dreadful. Let’s start out with the mother who thinks it a good idea to take her young son around a sinking ship into flooding compartments and flash fires. Yeah… she must have seen too many Julianne Moore films. And somebody tell me why we need a kid in a disaster film anyway? When he starts connecting with the adults and offering all kinds of cute little remarks I was just begging for the little shit to drown.
So the characters are insipid, the dialogue is awful, and the story elements are ripped-off from every B-movie you can think of (did I mention it steals the ending from Armageddon). But wait there are some stunts. Nope, those are bad too. The problem is everything is so CGI in the film nothing is or looks real and even the big disaster scene at the beginning looks more like a video game than something you are supposed to accept as actually happening to these characters. As I pointed out last year in my review of Dark Water, water just isn’t scary. Nor is climbing around a boat for two hours as fascinating as director Wolfgang Petersen would lead you to believe.
No one comes off well here except for maybe Stacy Fergson (Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas) who proves she might have the chops to make it as a lounge singer on a cruise ship. Even for a remake this film lacks anything resembling originality (or talent). Go rent any one of the many movies this one “borrows” from rather than paying to see this disaster of a film.