For a story set at sea, Ghost Ship is pretty landbound, with its leaden acting, dull exposition and telegraphed "surprises." It does, however, have five good minutes that almost seem to belong to another movie.
Those five open Ghost Ship with a weird mix of candy-flossed dine-and-dance nostalgia and a horrifically unsettling mass murder to a metal soundtrack. Not for the squeamish.
Director Steve Beck (13 Ghosts) must know this is his nugget, because he reprises and even elaborates on it to lesser effect at the end. Too bad about the 80 minutes in between.
The story -- full of plotholes you could drive an ocean liner through -- involves a crew of salvage rats, whose ranks include Capt. Murphy (Gabriel Byrne), Epps (Julianna Margulies), Dodge (Ron Eldard), Greer (Isaiah Washington), Santos (Alex Dimitriades) and Munder (Karl Urban). They're approached at dock by a pilot (Desmond Harrington) who's spotted a mysterious liner adrift in the Bering Sea.
So it is that they all set to sea, the Maritime Law book in hand and dollar signs in their eyes. I don't know about you, but I'm guessing this boat might be haunted, and one of the merry band of privateers just might be of sinister intent.
As with every crew that sets off into danger -- from The Abyss to Anaconda to Ghosts Of Mars -- this one boasts a handful of cliches: The two empty-headed jokers, the ethnic stereotype, the other ethnic stereotype with a fiancee back home whose picture is always in his hands, a babe who's tougher than the guys, etc.
The boat -- an Italian cruise ship missing for 40 years -- is indeed haunted, crammed with ghosts in fact, some of them of fairly recent vintage. What's left is for standard haunted house elements -- lifted linear from The Shining and other templates -- to be set in motion. These include the stranding, the mandatory creepy kid (Emily Browning), the flights into deceptive illusion, the not-really-that-scary malevolent force that reveals itself, the deaths in ascending order of actors' salary.
The decrepit liner itself makes for a suitably spooky set, but little is done with it, save for opening closet doors for the odd "Boo" and flooding bulkheads, ludicrously evoking Titanic (especially in the finale) and The Poseidon Adventure in equal measure.
It all makes for one leaky boat, and a fair bit of tedium. In the end it adds nothing to a genre badly in need of a sea change.
(This film is rated AA)
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