Kim Gentes

Abandon Ship! No Titanic, this movie Sinks...

This film has decidedly realistic tinge to all of its visuals. But what "comes to life" here is nothing short of grisly scenes of people dieing in a more realistic way than past oceanographic fear films. Scenes of people that really look like people dieing, being impaled, electrocuted and drowned certainly come through as crisp special effects.

The basic plot line of this movie (buoyed a script adapted from the novel of the same namesake) is actual interesting. This is a remake of the successful '72 film "The Poseidon Adventure", but it neither lives up to the book or the movie that precede it. So the characters are trying to survive on a ship headed for the deep six. You have your standard heroes, standard sacrificial characters and standard last minute escapes. But there is no real thinking, no real hope, and then no real excitement when each successive challenge is overcome. You want to find some characters to like, so you will enjoy the movie, but each time you find one, they are killed off.

What remains is only a very few good moments of film making. The rest is stereotypical explosion after explosion. Then more people dieing... yada yada yada. I know we should all feel bad about this, but the movie treats everything so haphazardly, the moviegoer starts to feel like that too. Nothing has depth, intelligence or moments of brilliance. By sheer luck (and seemly) cute subplots, the few survivors are somehow redeemed as being smarter than the couple thousand other schmucks that suffer a watery grave. There is one powerful, but quick moment of moral decision that is important. It teaches us that sometimes we must decide to live and in the process evaluate one human's life over another. Whether you like the contrived situation or not, you do find yourself having to press a moral decision. At least that is done.

But after that, the best part of this watery movie is when I went to the lavatory to take a break. My recommendation? See the original movie, and save this for a day when you have seen about every other tragedy movie you ever wanted to see. The actors here aren't convincing and don't save the film.

It's actually not a bad opportunity for Kurt Russell to do something admirable, but his thing character finds himself playing disappointing portrayals of both politicians (how is that possible?) and firefighters with one stereotype after another. Josh Lucas is carelessly pushing through obstacle after obstacle to be the backbone of this film, but he barely survives.

It's not a horrible film, but it has no zest, no reason, no edge and no results. It just sits there and drowns in its own massive heap of sinking emptiness. All those great effects go down with this film, which is surely going to disappoint from the huge amount of over hype promotion it has received.

Give me a life jacket!

If you must see this, leave the kids at home. No one under 13 should see this film, because the portrayals of death are as realistic as you might find in such a scenario.