Review: Poseidon

Posted by: Tom Milroy  •  May 12, 2006 @ 11:59am

Filed under: Reviews

This is neither a sequel to 1972's The Poseidon Adventure nor is it a re-make. It's more of a re-thinking. It is directed by a man who knows his way around water, Wolfgang Petersen, the same guy who brought us Das Boot and The Perfect Storm.

On the plus side, Poseidon gets right into the action. It has to, because everyone knows what the plot is: "Big wave hits cruise ship. Cruise ship turns upside down." On the negative side, characters are introduced but we never see their fate once they vanish from the screen. Sure, I know they drown, but I want to see how. Why show us Andre Braugher as the captain if you're not going to finish his story? Anyway, it was still fun to watch because Petersen knows how to make tense scenes.

Josh Lucas plays Dylan, the would-be leader of the escapees, who prefers to work on his own, but, well, you know. Kurt Russell is the former firefighter/former mayor of New York who is on the ship with his daughter and her fiancé. (This is sounding a lot like an episode of Love Boat.) Richard Dreyfuss is the unhappy gay guy. Kevin Dillon, looking more and more like older brother Matt, has a too-short bit as an oily character who gets crushed by something that falls from the ceiling, or is that floor?

At the beginning of the movie, you see one of the ship's entertainers and you may say to yourself: "Who is that? I recognize her from somewhere." It's Stacy Ferguson, aka Fergie from Black Eyed Peas.

You'd expect a movie like this to run about two and a half hours, but no, our heroes and heroines manage to escape at a shade under 100 minutes. As for comparisons to the original, it's not better or worse, it's just newer. All things considered, it keeps its head above water.