Poseidon

The abbreviated title of Wolfgang Petersen's remake of Ronald Neame's 1972 The Poseidon Adventure (the quintessential disaster movie) is very appropriate, since this is a slimmed-down version of the iconic tale of passengers struggling to escape from a sinking luxury liner. Poseidon jettisons the original's admittedly perfunctory efforts at characterization, content simply to trot out a collection of cardboard passengers in assembly-line fashion, before the “rogue wave” strikes and the important business of survival gets underway, featuring the usual dangerous passages, hair-breadth escapes, and periodic gurgling demises (most of which are involuntary but occasionally involve noble self-sacrifice). If the sparse “personal” material in the movie is any indication, the loss of backstory is probably good: the banality of what remains is so staggering that the dialogue often invites giggles, spoken by characters that are themselves walking clichés, played by a roster of determinedly second-string actors. The visual effects are decent, but everything else is just old-fashioned melodramatic flotsam and jetsam that is more likely to generate laughs than excitement. Not recommended. [Note: DVD extras on this two-disc set include the 29-minute History Channel documentary “Rogue Waves,” the 23-minute “making-of” featurette “Ship on a Soundstage,” a 13-minute “A Shipmates Diary” featurette about a film school intern's experiences on the set, the 11-minute featurette “Upside Down” on the film's unique set design, and trailers. Bottom line: aside from the History Channel doc, this is a fairly fluff set of extras for a soggy thriller.] (F. Swietek)