Poseidon: Critic Reviews

There is no great romance, no epic special effects, just a lot of terrible dialogue spoken by wooden actors in a film so CGI dependent; I felt like I was watching a video game.

[An] excellently undemanding, swimmingly enjoyable remake.

The chief virtue of Wolfgang Petersen's reasonably well-executed remake of The Poseidon Adventure is that it keeps the action moving.

It will be a minor treat to rent the DVD, and freeze-frame some of the more choice wooden expressions.

Poseidon is a sodden saga, with a script that is awash in cliches. It nearly drowns under the weight of its own soggy tedium.

Poseidon isn't cute, funny, warm, nice, inspirational or uplifting. It's about the incredible labor of survival in a world turned totally sociopathic in an instant.

There will be people who won't go to United 93 because they think it will be depressing yet will go to Poseidon expecting an exciting night at the movies, and I guess I don't understand how their brains work.

An utterly empty-skulled genre mechanism and nothing more.

Where the first film had to rely on stunt work and character conflicts, the remake is action on top of unbelievable action.

Poseidon betrays a studio mindset that can only hasten the current erosion of movie attendance -- skimping on human content while betting heedlessly on boom boom boom and gurgle gurgle gurgle.

If The Poseidon Adventure was pure camp classic, Wolfgang Petersen's uninspired re-do succeeds at neither -- it's not camp and it's not classic.

You will definitely gasp and gulp while watching the new film. But, sadly, these reactions won't be traced to the expert effects. Instead, you'll find yourself gasping and gulping at the incredibly lame dialogue.

While the ship's survivors are driven to live, Poseidon is never character-driven enough to make us care.

As a humanist, I applaud the respect for life, but I miss the campy fun. The movie is, in all senses, a big downer.

Throughout the movie, Petersen has a dynamic feel for the rush and heave of the deluge, the pent-up energy, the sheer heft and momentum.

Petersen's heart isn't in it. He is too wise a director to think this is first-rate material, and too good a director to turn it into enjoyable trash.

We've sailed these waters before. Poseidon has been reimagined, if that's the word for it, in an impersonal, Palm Piloted manner, though not without its share of unintended laughs.

As enjoyably silly as the original.

There's nothing hip or ironic about Poseidon, which makes Russell and Lucas the perfect leading men: jut-jawed, macho, and able to keep a straight face while being pinned by fake beams, and held hostage by page upon page of sappy dialogue.

Relying on empty spectacle rather than drama, Poseidon sinks faster than a topsy-turvy cruise ship.

Watered-down in every way imaginable, Poseidon capsizes under the very large load of corn it carries.

The movie is filled with flimsy characters with lives summed up in a tossed-off line or two.

Wolfgang Petersen's large-scale liner moves reasonably well, though anyone with the faintest memory of its 1972 predecessor will wonder where most of the plot went, and the dialogue is so stilted it can honestly be said the less the better.

Poseidon is named after the wrong god. The god of laughter and derision is Momus, who was cast out of Olympus for mocking Zeus, Athena and Poseidon.

So what if it's not United 93? It's about the spectacularly perilous journey, not the people making it, not some message about an under-regulated industry and accidents waiting to happen.