What on earth is Wolfgang Petersen thinking? I mean, Troy was garbage, but perfectly pleasant in a He-Man; Masters Of The Universe sort of way. Poseidon, on the other hand, represents about eight new kinds of crap. You’d imagine the Das Boot director couldn’t go too far astray with a remake of the trashy 1972 disaster flick. He seems happy on the water. He can bang out a decent action set-piece. Not here, he can’t.
After a perfunctory 20 minutes spent introducing the film’s woefully dislikeable characters, a tidal wave hits the cruise ship Poseidon and we’re off. But where to, exactly? We quickly learn that our merry band of survivors all possess talents uniquely suited to escaping ships that happen to get struck by a rogue wave and tossed upside down. Kurt Russell is a former fire-fighter. Josh Lucas was once a naval officer. Somebody else is a great swimmer. Richard Dreyfus – a gay architect replete with sparkly diamond earring – is considerably less use, but at least he can keep it together. The same cannot be said of the inadequate, hysterical female characters. The plot may be transported from the 1970s, but the shrieking damsels and sexual politics seem to have come straight from the 1870s.
If there’s a worse popcorn movie this summer, I’ll eat my hat. A disaster in every possible sense.