Poseidon (2006)

Turn-a-boat

Following in the wake of another notable maiden-voyage catastrophe, it really isn’t the best of nights for sparkling ship Poseidon. The luxurious cruise liner is hit by a huge rogue wave on its New Year’s voyage and, as anyone who has seen Ronald Neame’s 1972 original, The Poseidon Adventure, will tell you, is turned upside down. Ill-advisedly, most of the surviving 2,000 passengers decide to wait for the rescue teams.

However, former New York mayor Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell), his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum) and her boyfriend Christian (Mike Vogel), Elena Gonzalez (Mía Maestro), Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss) and Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas) realize that time is running out and make a break to escape the sinking ship, by climbing to the hull.

The group is later joined by Maggie James (Jacinda Barrett) and her son Conor (Jimmy Bennett). How on earth will they make it out without Reverend Gene Hackman there to protect them?

Well, there’s a celebrity-filled cast, heaps of special effects and stunts and oodles of human drama for the cost of your DVD. This delivers the goods for those seeking an engaging survival action thriller; there’s enough onscreen calamity (at times truly awe-inspiring) plus a fair sense of how harrowing it would be to be caught up in a disaster of this magnitude.

However, director Wolfgang Petersen’s earlier nautical yarns (Das Boot (1981), The Perfect Storm (2000) had something else going for them other than the son et lumière of a rip-roaring disaster, concentrating more on the characterizations and interaction, allowing us to really root for the victims.

With Poseidon, however, we simply know that some will live, some will die – the only real question is which of them won’t make it, and how they’ll be dispatched. The way the film is constructed, even this aspect feels a little too predictable to be enthralling.

Almost all of the points scored are won strictly in the technical arena, not as a result of convincing performances. There is a modest attempt at some development of personal motives early in the film, but not enough to make us care, except on the most basic of levels.

Still, if you’ve always wanted to know how it would feel to get caught in a wash/spin cycle, this is the film for you. Just don’t expect anything but the FX to be watertight.

99 mins.

3 Responses to “Poseidon (2006)”