Out of Sink

On New Year's Eve in the film "Poseidon", the titular cruise ship is struck by an enormous wall of water and flipped over. The script would have us believe that the capsizing is caused by a "rogue wave" which, as one crew member puts it, is "rare and unpredictable". The same cannot be said for the film itself, the second and hopefully final remake of the 1972 disaster classic, "The Poseidon Adventure". The story remains the same (they may have taken the "adventure" out of the title, but thankfully they left it in the script): after the ship comes unnaturally to rest upside-down, a group of intrepid souls goes against the advice of the crew and attempts to climb up into the ship's belly to find a way out.

The script by Mark Protosevich which was, like the original, based on Paul Gallico's novel, forces the survivors to run, jump and swim from one exploding set-piece to another with little time to think. And though that might make for a thrilling summer blockbuster, it does little to endear us to the characters. There's no Gene Hackman, no Ernest Borgnine and certainly no Shelley Winters here - though their ghosts loom large over the soggy, B-list cast, particularly during the rote ending sequence.

Kurt Russell and Josh Lucas attempt to inject some macho rivalry into the proceedings as dual heroes, and Richard Dreyfuss (always good to see him back on the water) lends the film more emotion than it deserves as a jilted gay architect. In a fit of expository character development, Mr. Russell's Robert Ramsey is said to be both an ex-fireman and an ex-Mayor of New York. That choice, I imagine, is supposed to add some gravitas to the line "it's never fair who lives and who dies". Fair? Maybe not. Predictable? absolutely. Though the water is constantly pushing the cast onward, there is never a moment when you wonder who will survive. It's all fairly telegraphed from the beginning during some particularly grating opening exposition. These days a disaster film doesn't have the nerve to kill off a Shelley Winters, for example, let alone create a character worth caring about.

And so the only character of note is the ship itself, which is - as you'd expect - a marvel of computer generated fakery. The capsizing as well is, of course, spectacular. And it better be for the hefty price tag of the film. In a post-"Titanic" world, you see, we need swooping, uncut, 360 degree shots of Josh Lucas jogging around the upper decks of the floating behemoth.

Director Wolfgang Petersen is no stranger to the ocean, with both "Das Boot" and "The Perfect Storm" under his belt. He keeps the pace brisk (it's a full twenty minutes quicker to get out of a capsized ship nowadays) and there is one effective, if preposterous, new sequence in an air vent. But the question lingers, was a remake - let alone the rightly ignored 2005 TV movie version - really necessary? With Gene Hackman's Reverend/action hero cut from the script, there's none of the religious overtones of the original, which is fine. But this "Poseidon" doesn't seem to stand for anything except a blatant attempt to cash in on an established property. I suppose for a new generation that hasn't seen the original, this new "Poseidon" will be fine popcorn fare, but I left the film with a different kind of sinking feeling: I'd seen this all before.