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PLOT: A rogue wave swamps an elite cruise ship, dooming most passengers to a watery grave. One intrepid group tries to find a way out of the doomed ship's upturned hull.
In Poseidon, a re-make of The Poseidon Adventure from 1972, the boat sinks. Then the audience drowns in a tidal wave of special effects, sentimentality and bad acting.
In other words, it's business as usual in Hollywood, at least in terms of summer spectacles. As a popcorn flick, Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible III is still the better bet so far in summer 2006.
In Wolfgang Petersen's Poseidon, Josh Lucas plays the reluctant hero. Flashing baby blues like a young Paul Newman, he looks the part of a bona fide movie star, but he is still waiting for the movie that will catapult him into Cruise territory.
Comparing Poseidon with the original, Lucas, as a cynical gambler with U.S. Navy experience, replaces Gene Hackman, who played a cynical clergyman at war with God. Otherwise, the ensemble bears little resemblance to the original movie, Paul Gallico's novel or real life.
This is a motley gang of characters. Kurt Russell, light years removed from Snake Plissken, signs on for the Escape from Poseidon. But his character, a former fireman and former mayor of New York, is a big wiener. Insufferable, even.
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Emmy Rossum (emoting more than in The Phantom Of The Opera) plays his feisty daughter while Mike Vogel is her secret fiance. Other key characters are played by Jacinda Barrett, Jimmy Bennett, Mia Maestro, Andre Braugher as the bewildered captain and Kevin Dillon as an odious lout.
Most egregious was casting Richard Dreyfuss as a gay architect whose lover has abandoned him, leaving the poor fellow suicidal. He is climbing over the railing just as the wave approaches the ship after the New Year's Eve midnight celebrations. That's enough to make him want to live. Talk about hokum! The stuff Dreyfuss is obliged to say and do makes mockery of his career.
Poseidon is not a total disaster. Petersen (Troy, The Perfect Storm) has the skills to lead the effects crews in making the rogue wave and the ensuing carnage look real. Bizarrely, the early scenes when the S.S. Poseidon is sailing on calm Atlantic seas under a perfect sunset look phony. Digital can make scenes too good to believe.
Every disaster movie needs strong characters and emotional weight to make us care if anyone survives. In Poseidon, they all seem like actors doing their jobs, not people facing oblivion. Too many archetypes, too many banal lines, but not enough howlers to turn Poseidon into campy satire.
In Das Boot, the finest submarine film ever made, Petersen made us care deeply -- even about the enemy -- in the German-made World War II film. In Poseidon, and in his Hollywood career in general, he seems to have given up the humanistic focus of his early films in favour of empty spectacle.
BOTTOM LINE: Wolfgang Petersen's re-make of the original 1972 disaster movie is flashy, too obviously digitalized and a sodden mess as a human story.
(This film is rated PG)