Film Review: Poseidon

[tag]Poseidon[/tag] is a remarkable film. Remarkable in that its 99 minutes provide a masterclass in what is wrong with modern American movies. Actually just the first five minutes is enough to explain why the last five years of blockbusters have been so extraordinarily… insipid. So weak in spirit, lacking in soul, and, well, so completely lifeless.

Which is especially ironic of course as Poseidon is all about saving lives. It is a remake of the 1972 classic [tag]Poseidon Adventure[/tag], and follows a motley crue as they try to escape from inside a giant luxury cruise ship, overturned by a freak wave and slowly sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

The original was a deeply touching and tense battle against the odds that highlighted man’s greatest gifts and his worst instincts. The remake however is an ill-fitting jigsaw of increasingly improbable scenarios and emotionally dishonest stop-gaps.

[tag]Kurt Russell[/tag] plays the lead role of Robert Ramsey who has to overcome a series of obstacles as they work their way upwards into the bowels of the boat in the hope of reaching the propellors before the whole thing goes under. It would be nice to say that [tag]Josh Lucas[/tag] stole the limelight as rogue Dylan Johns, but that would be as implausible as his performance. Both were upstaged by the film’s hidden baddie: seductively complex computer-generated effects. It’s perfectly possible that Russell gave a performance of similar brilliance to [tag]Gene Hackman[/tag]’s in the original but if he did it was completely lost amid the mindless yelling, rushing around and endless shots of water exploding out of every orifice that a ship possesses.

It’s a common complaint that computer graphics appear at the expense of storylines, but not so in Poseidon, where the bonus of remaking a film with a pre-existing, simple plot was made the most of. What was lost amid the grand shots of an overturned ship, an overturned foyer, an overturned nightclub, an overturned lift shaft, and so on, was an emotional connection between the audience and the characters, or between the characters themselves.

Poseidon is so shallow that you wonder why they’re bothering to fight their way to the bottom of the ship at all, when they could just as easily slip out one of the 95 million smashed windows and and find themselves only neck-deep in the watery stuff. Two-thirds of all drowning deaths happen in six inches of water, you know.

The director makes up for this emotional paucity by sticking us in the path of blasts of raw passion. NOOOOOOO!!!! roars Josh Lucas when one of the women dies. What’s up with him? you ponder, while trying to remember if she was the carefree daughter or the gutsy stowaway. Either way, there’s no point in getting worked up. She didn’t.

These sudden explosions of emotion match the sudden explosions of fire and water, but none of them help make it any clearer what is going on. Perhaps a special extended five-hour DVD version of the film would stitch it all together but even that would be hard-pushed to explain the existence of Lucky Larry, played by Kevin Dillon, who has one swig of whisky and starts behaving like Jim Carrey on crack.

Before you have a chance to meditate on the pressure they must be under, Larry has been dispatched, Dylan has performed an impossible feat of daring, there’s been another blast of hot emotion between Robert and his daughter, someone nearly dies but doesn’t, and – christ! – they’re all nearly drowning again. And that’s the problem with adventure films at the moment: directors have forgotten about suspense. Suspense requires careful handling, a gradual build of tension and then an abrupt confrontation. What we get instead is a 100-metre sprint, followed by a second 100-metre sprint, following by a third 100-metre sprint, each one spliced together with a shot of water (or fire) exploding out of somewhere or other.

It is telling that the most haunting part of the original film – when Hackman and his band pass a long line of zombie-like passengers walking the opposite direction towards certain death – simply doesn’t appear in the flaccid 2006 remake. There’s no walking in this film.

In fact, Poseidon is so desperate to get on with the next death-defying stunt that it barely bothers with the one it is currently stuck in. And just to keep the adrenaline flowing, each stunt is increasingly dangerous or impossible. The result is that most of the cast are revealed as super-human before they’re even halfway through. Panic sets in, and soon even the film’s own internal logic is sacrificed in an effort to extract one more ounce of excitement.

The small boy in the troupe suddenly pops up behind a grille seconds away from being drowned. “How did you get there?” yells his mother. “I don’t know,” he yells back, raising the possibility that the scriptwriter may have grown as sick of the film’s corruption as you. He is saved – but don’t for god’s sake try to figure out how. Five minutes and 19 death-defying feats later, Russell gets so sick of the fake emotion that he decides there is only one course of action: drown himself. But not before he sticks the engines in reverse in a hearty effort to make sure the whole film is committed to the deep, never to be found.

This brave sacrifice (the only one in a damp squib of a movie) is rightly hailed as “genius” by another cast member – who must still be pondering how he is running around on a broken foot – but is tragically foiled at the last minute by a quick rewriting of the laws of physics whereby a 1kg fire extinguisher is capable of stopping a 500-tonne propellor in its tracks. The final escape sequences is so ludicrous that even the director has the decency to run through it all in approximately six seconds. And then, somehow, finally, it’s all over. Thank god. You survived.

1/5

Poseidon will be out in the UK on 2 June.