Poseidon

MOVIE DETAILS

Rating: 5.7 out of 10
Director: Wolfgang Petersen
Writer: Mark Protosevich, Paul Gallico
Star: Richard Dreyfuss, Kurt Russell, Emmy Rossum
Genres: Action/Adventure/Thriller
Release Date: May 12, 2006 (United States)

As I watched “Poseidon,” the word perfunctory kept intruding upon my thoughts. Other words, I hoped. I knew I wasn’t enjoying the movie, but still held out hope that it would get better or, failing that, fail in an interesting way. But no. It was perfunctory cursory, desultory, hurried, rapid, fleeting, token, casual, superficial, careless, halfhearted sketchy mechanical automatic routine and offhand.

Yes. And if you want to see movies that aren’t those things well then consider other films by director Wolfgang Petersen such as “Das Boot” (1981) and “In the Line of Fire” (1993) and “The Perfect Storm” (2000). In “The Perfect Storm,” he showed a fishing boat trying to climb up an impossible hill of water and failing. It’s one of the best adventure movies of recent years; it has vivid characters; its special effects are convincing; it feels like the sea is relentless.

Having made such good movies himself it doesn’t seem as though Petersen was inspired by the chance to remake a movie that wasn’t that good to begin with. Everybody knows how this story turns out; most of the suspense centers around who gets to play Shelley Winters and hold their breath for a long time under water. “Poseidon” follows as it must the formula for a Disaster Movie: (1) have your container full of characters; (2) let cameos establish them in broad strokes; (3.) destroy your container with a catastrophe; (4) make your survivors struggle to survive while (5) killing hated character(s) and saving beloved character(s), and also killing lots of extras unemotionally along the way although at this point we might be interested in adding some deadly snakes on the loose in there somewhere except they are all in “Snakes on a Plane.”

The container can be an ocean liner, an airplane, a skyscraper, a Super Bowl stadium no difference. This time it is an ocean liner that flips over after being hit by a “rogue wave” and continues to float only now upside down. The captain (Andre Braugher) tells the passengers they’ll be safe in the giant ballroom, where they’ve just been celebrating New Year’s Eve. A few of them think not; they decide to save themselves by essentially escaping up the down staircase.

These characters include heroic Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas), equally heroic Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell), his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum), obnoxious Lucky Larry (Kevin Dillon), suicidal Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss), mother Maggie Jameson (Jacinda Barrett) and son Conor (Jimmy Bennett) and stowaway Elena Morales (Mia Maestro). All of their human stories will play out against the drama of the endangered ship. As they say.

What do I mean by “perfunctory”? Petersen’s heart isn’t in it. He is too experienced a director to be impressed with this material, and too accomplished to make it extraordinary trash. We know we are going to have to endure several standard situations: (1) a dangerous crossing over a bottomless canyon; (2) an escape from rooms that seem locked forever; (3) repeated threats of drowning and electrocution; (4) key choices between the right button that will save them and the wrong one that will destroy them, or vice versa, and (5) brilliant deductions by people who can’t tell a bulkhead from a ballast tank but instantly find charts, maps and diagrams they can read (“This is the way out!” “The bulkheads are activated by water pressure!” “This is the ballast tank!”).

Throughout all this time, exterior CGI shots will show the ship being smashed by titanic explosions, although oddlly enough lights come on now and then when convenient, and everybody has all the flashlights they need so we can see what they’re doing. The characters also will find time for all their romantic entanglements, family histories, personal obsessions and character defects that have been laboriously introduced for exactly this reason.

Nothing is wrong with the performances. All of these actors are pros, though none has as much fun as Shelley Winters did in 1972. They are wet most of the time, scared most of the time, in danger most of the time and surrounded much of the time by special effects. Then some of them live and some die. You don’t know anything at end you didn’t know at beginning. In better hands this could have been another sequel to “Airplane!,” called “Ocean Liner!,” in which once everybody battles their way to top (i.e., bottom) of overturned ship uprights itself and they have to go back down again.

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