It's a relief to report Wolfgang Petersen's Poseidon may be a disaster movie, but it's far from being a disaster.
It's a great white-knuckle thrill ride that piles calamity upon catastrophe, refusing to ease up once the initial tragedy occurs.
It's New Years Eve and a luxury liner sets sail for a lavish celebration.
At the stroke of midnight the Poseidon gets hit by an enormous rogue wave that topples the ship as if it were a child's toy in a bathtub.
What happens to the exterior of the ship is a bit of a disappointment. The wave and boat appear computer-generated and everything happens much too quickly.
But not so the mayhem and carnage inside.
Instead, director Wolfgang Petersen concentrates on the action in the ballroom as the ceiling becomes the floor -- dumping furniture, fixtures and passengers.
It's scary and unsettling because, this time, the effects are so realistic.
The captain (Andre Braugher) urges the survivors to remain in the ballroom and remain calm.
He assures them the construction of the ballroom will work something like a fishbowl keeping air in and water out.
The viewer is not the only one to realize the glass bowl will eventually burst.
Professional gambler Dylan (Josh Lucas) doesn't buy this scenario either, so he decides to climb to the bottom of the ship and escape through one of the propeller shafts.
He's joined by single mom Maggie (Jacinda Barrett) and her preteen son Conor (Jimmy Bennett), as well as former New York mayor Robert Ramsay (Kurt Russell), his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum) and her boyfriend Christian (Mike Vogel).
Along for the arduous, treacherous hike are stowaway Elena (Mia Maestro), waiter Valentin (Freddy Rodriguez), drunken oil man Lucky Larry (Kevin Dillon) and despondent aging gay businessperson Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss).
Even in this select group, not everyone will survive.
Petersen forgoes the character setups Ronald Neame carefully detailed in 1972's The Poseidon Adventure, which inspired this remake.
This means the audience has less of a genuine emotional investment in the characters.
The deaths may be frightening, but they are not particularly heart-wrenching.
Anyone who is claustrophobic or the least bit afraid of water will find themselves panicking as much as the survivors as the ship continues to sink, the water to rise and hallways become underwater canals.
There's a scream-out-loud sequence in an elevator shaft and another pulse-raiser in a ventilation shaft.
It should come as little surprise when a disaster-at-sea flick works so well.
Petersen, who directed Das Boot and The Perfect Storm, knows how to build tension and suspense, always showing just how uncaring and unrelenting the sea can be.
Petersen has trimmed Poseidon to a lean 97 minutes, 80 of which are a carefully calculated adrenalin fix.
(This film is rated PG)
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