By 7 p.m., the previews started rolling at my screening of Poseidon. Less than a half-hour later, the titular cruise ship was upside-down, and by 8:36 p.m., I was headed to my car.
You've got to respect a movie that knows how to get in and get out without wearing out its welcome. Wolfgang Petersen's remake of The Poseidon Adventure does just that, if not anything else.
Following some very silly and very perfunctory expository scenes that attempt to establish the main characters, the cruise ship Poseidon is knocked upside down by a rogue wave and begins to sink. A small group of survivors must then find a way out of the ship.
Mark Protosevich's screenplay is a marvel of stupid economy; there isn't a lot of character development, but what little exists is laughable. For this kind of movie, dialogue takes a backseat to action, and rightly so.
Petersen certainly has assembled an interesting cast, although again, like dialogue, acting isn't really important here. Kurt Russell ' who deserves better at this point in his career ' plays Robert Ramsey, a former firefighter who was also mayor of New York for a while. Among the supporting cast are Emmy Rossum, who plays Ramsey's daughter, and Richard Dreyfuss, who plays a suicidal gay man, along with Kevin Dillon (Matt's brother) as Lucky Larry
whose puffy shirt looks like it was nicked from the wardrobe of the original film.
That leaves Josh Lucas (A Beautiful Mind). He plays Dylan, a professional gambler/former Navy man with a knowledge of ship layouts (What luck!), which brings me to a brief digression. Are there professional gamblers in real life? I've only ever seen them in movies and on TV. Do they file taxes? Can they get insurance? Just curious.
Anyway, the movie itself is reasonably entertaining, as long as you don't take any of it seriously ' at least not as seriously as the actors seem to.
That being said, I thought the body count was a tad low for a disaster movie. The original was much crueler ' although admittedly much sappier ' and it kept the surprising deaths coming all the way to the end.
So which is better? It's tough to call. This new one is shorter and definitely moves faster, but the original cast easily trumps the remake's bunch. The effects for the remake are fine, but nothing spectacular and not that much better than the original.
Either way, if you take your cruise ships upside-down, Poseidon is for you. 17
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Ben Saylor
