Poseidon (Theatrical Film Review)

 

Stars: Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, Emmy Rossum

Director: Wolfgang Petersen

Critic's rating: 5 out of 10

 

Review by Chuck O'Leary

 

After the huge success of Airport (1970), and middling box office for an effective Airport wannabe called Skyjacked (1972), Irwin Allen's production of The Poseidon Adventure, about a group of disparate survivors trying to find their way out of a capsized ocean-liner, was the next all-star "group jeopardy" film to reach theaters.  Debuting during the holiday season of 1972, The Poseidon Adventure became a major hit, but the '70s disaster film wouldn't reach its peak until two years later with the release of Earthquake in the fall of 1974 and Allen's The Towering Inferno in December, 1974.

 

But after Star Wars opened in May, 1977, disaster flicks suddenly became old hat.  The genre had run its course, but nobody told Allen, who went on to produce three more disaster epics, The Swarm (1978), Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979) and When Time Ran Out (1980) all of which bombed, and, along with non-Allen flops like The Concorde: Airport '79, and Meteor (1979), finished off the cycle. 

 

Such disaster movies were a thing of the past until Hollywood tried to revive the genre in the mid-to-late '90s, only now with computer-generated effects, fewer big names and even weaker characterization -- Twister, Armageddon and Dante's Peak are a few examples.  Those '90s disaster films also sorely missed the authoritive presence of a Charlton Heston, Paul Newman or George Kennedy, and once again proved that CGI was more a curse than a blessing.

 

Interestingly, though, the best of those '90s disaster films was a variation of The Poseidon Adventure called Daylight starring Sylvester Stallone.  But instead of having a group of survivors trapped in an overturned ship, Daylight changed the setting to an underwater tunnel that collapses after an explosion.

 

Now comes Poseidon, a $160 million re-imagining of The Poseidon Adventure, which falls into the same trap as most other disaster films from recent years.  Once again, the makers of Poseidon mistakenly assume computer-generated effects, and more of them, can overcome a screenplay that's even shallower than those of the '70s disaster movies.  The result is a remake that plays like it was filmed from a Cliffs Notes adaptation of Paul Gallico's novel, The Poseidon Adventure.  I'm not sure whether it was intended this way by director Wolfgang Petersen or studio executives forced him to make heavy cuts, but the remake has the feeling of a film that's been stripped of everything expect the action/peril sequences.

 

This is surprising since Petersen already made one classic (Das Boot) and one very good film (The Perfect Storm) concerning a group of people fighting for their lives on the high seas.  He was clearly a logical choice for Poseidon, and proves he still knows how to generate suspense and hold an audience after experiencing his career nadir two years ago with the bloated, boring and overlong Troy.  But while Troy was too long, Poseidon is a too short.  From the moment the film begins until the end credits hit the screen, it's 88 minutes, with approximately 10 minutes of end credits, compared to the 1972 original, which runs 117 minutes. 

 

Petersen’s Poseidon has more fireballs and rushing water, but nothing even approaches the entertainment value of Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine constantly yelling at one another in the original.  By comparison, the survivors in Petersen's version are much more bland.

 

And in another hint of a how wary Hollywood has become of anything remotely Christian in recent years, the hero of the piece is no longer the reverend Hackman played in the original, but a professional gambler played by Josh Lucas.  When the Lucas' gambler says "I work better alone," this is the kind of trite script where it's a given he'll be responsible for saving several others.  There's also an obnoxious drunk (Kevin Dillon) whose mere presence is clearly just a setup for his inevitable death.  You know this guy's a goner from the moment he makes his first inappropriate comment. 

 

If the original gave us stock characters, the remake literally has one-note characters whose places in life are reduced to a sentence or two.  At least the original slowed down enough occasionally for its stock characters to interact.  In the remake, the pace is so relentless that you sometimes can't hear what the characters are saying through all the commotion.

 

Instead of Hackman's reverend, Borgnine's temperamental cop and Shelley Winters' chubby middle-age woman whose swimming skills save the day, the main group of survivors in the remake include a former mayor of New York City (Kurt Russell), his daughter (Emmy Rossum) and her boyfriend (Mike Vogel); a gay man (Richard Dreyfuss) who's contemplating suicide right before the giant wave capsizes the ship; a single mother (Jacinda Barrett) and her little boy (Jimmy Bennett); and a Hispanic stowaway (Mia Maestro) assisted by a guy (Freddy Rodriguez) who works aboard the ship.

 

Andre Braugher replaces Leslie Nielsen as the ship's captain, and Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson plays the singer performing when the waves hits -- in real life it would more likely be Charo.

 

Rossum is an extraordinarily pretty young woman, who, at just 19 years of age, is already a disaster film veteran having survived The Day After Tomorrow two summers ago.  She's quickly becoming the female equivalent of Charlton Heston or George Kennedy.

 

To be fair, Poseidon is always watchable by the standards of modern-day remakes, but except for the sequence of the ship capsizing, it does nothing to improve upon the original.  My advice is to buy or rent the new DVD special edition of the original, and only invest your time and money on the remake if a longer director's cut appears when it hits DVD.

 

At least, though, the ending of Petersen's Poseidon will make it harder for Warner Bros. to remake Beyond the Poseidon Adventure.