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Back Shelf Beauties
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Poseidon I had one reason to see this remake of The Poseidon Adventure. I wanted to see Fergie from The Black Eyed Peas DIE! I wanted her to die painfully. I wanted to see her die twice if necessary. I hate their music. I hate their commercials. Most of all, I hate Fergie's fakeness. Even when the boat flips over and starts filling with water, Fergie, playing a singer on the cruise ship (REAL BIG ACTING CHALLENGE THERE!) has so much silicone, collagen, and saline in her body, you get the feeling her lady lumps would just float to the top, but I didn't care as long as I got some vicarious satisfaction. In Poseidon, Josh Lucas stars as Dylan - a professional gambler and loner traveling on the cruise ship Poseidon on New Year's Eve. Also along for the ride, we have the former Mayor of New York, Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell); his daughter, Jennifer (Emmy Rossum), and her boyfriend, Christian (Mike Vogel); single mother Maggie (Jacinda "Real World Girl" Barrett) and her son, Conor (Jimmy Bennett); broken hearted and suicidal Richard (Richard Dreyfuss); and stowaway Elena (Mia Maestro). They never knew each other before this fateful trip, but the group is forced to pull together when the cruise ship is hit by a tsunami-like rogue wave that has flips the boat over. The beautiful people survive as the massive machine starts to sink (only fat and ugly people die in Hollywood), so, against captain's orders, they team up to climb to a higher portion of the ship, hoping to escape and find rescue outside the vessel. Who will live? Who will die? Do they have any hope of rescue? Poseidon is a huge disappointment, and might be the biggest letdown of the summer. Writer Mark Protosevich and director Wolfgang Peterson have removed any humanity from the movie to make it into a special effects spectacular that is far from spectacular. It's not even average, ordinary or so-so. Published reports have indicated the movie had a $150 Million budget, but it's hard to see it on the screen. The special effects are hit and miss with some stuff looking good - like scenes of the ship filling with water, and other stuff looking fake - like the rogue wave coming to destroy the ship, or some exterior explosions on the ship that don't look realistic (and Fergie). Even the dead passengers look like they were taken out of B-level zombie movie, and made me laugh more than feel the horror on this ship. If the money didn't go into special effects, how much did they pay Kurt Russell? They certainly didn't pay him to act. Protosevich does not provide much background for our characters, and only slips in little nuggets here and there throughout the movie. This leads to awkward, meaningless and forgettable dialogue in those rare moments the characters talk to each other. Because we know so little about them, how they might be changed by all of this, or how the characters have developed, Peterson gives us very little reason to care about them one way or another. Instead, we are supposed to pull for them for the obvious reasons - because it's a mom and child, because it's a father and daughter, etc. This stinks because the compelling attraction to a disaster movie like this, or any of the classics like The Towering Inferno, is watching to see who will die, in what order, and how. Further hurting the movie, Peterson and Protosevich don't space out the action enough, which takes away the tension and drama in each challenge the passengers face in this improbable, death defying struggle to survive. None of the actors face a serious challenge, and none of them has the kind of scene stealing performance Shelley Winters had on the original. Dreyfuss should have known he could have achieved such status with his character, but no go thanks to the script. Lucas is very good with bad material, which can also be said of Rossum, Russell and Dreyfuss, but this is not an actors' movie. All they have to do is look breathless, scared, and wet. Finally, Peterson never establishes a tone solidly campy or serious, so Poseidon floats somewhere in the middle as some characters are over the top and silly, while the rest are playing it for real. One way or the other might have worked, but seeing the two tones mixed together reminds us what the movie should have been, compared to what we got. 1 Waffle (Out Of 4) Copyright 2006 - WaffleMovies.com
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