Officially, the new trouble-on-the-high-seas flick "Poseidon" is based upon 1972's "The Poseidon Adventure," in which passengers on the luxury cruise ship Poseidon struggle to survive when a giant rogue wave totally capsizes the boat, trapping them upside down.
For those of you who haven't seen the original (this reviewer included) and would like to get a gist of the new film, consider the classic computer game "Lemmings," in which players guided a group of mindless rodents through a series of deadly obstacles by employing specialized lemmings -- a "digger" or a "ramp builder," for instances -- to make safe passage for the rest of the bunch. Fail to employ the proper lemming and the rest of them will march blindly into a deathtrap.
"Poseidon" stars Kurt Russell and Josh Lucas as the special lemmings, guiding a small group of passengers through a series of deadly obstacles by digging or building. That's it, seriously; the ship capsizes immediately and while fully 99 percent of the passengers await their eventual death in the ship's main ballroom (it's New Year's Eve, folks, and the party must go on, upside down or not), the brazen Robert Ramsey (Russell) and Dylan Johns (Lucas) fight their way to the surface through obstacle after obstacle with a small, uninteresting group of supporting characters in tow.
It's worth mentioning one of the supporting characters -- 9-year-old Conor played by Jimmy Bennett -- because his look and demeanor are just awkward enough, in that pre-adolescent kind of way, to elicit hisses rather than sympathy when he wanders off and jeopardizes the survival of the party en masse. He played a similarly annoying role in the recent Harrison Ford bomb "Firewall," so now he's twice proven that even children can fail to garner audience sympathy.
As far as chemistry goes ... it doesn't. Sure there's a few obligatory pauses that allow the characters to hug and cry and make absurd, empty promises, but rather than being treated with tenderness and tact, these moments function as annoyances to the plot's momentum. After all, there are hundreds of passages in a cruise ship and even more ways to block them -- why not see how many combinations we can jam into a single film?
The only thing that could make Poseidon worse is a melodramatic ballad by Canadian born singer Celine Dion to accompany the films dénouement (see Titanic). Slightly less annoying is a melodramatic ballad by Mexican born singer Stacy Ferguson, better known as Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas, who also plays a bit role as the ships sultry entertainer.
Thank God director Wolfgang Peterson's instincts led him in the opposite direction of James Cameron's in "Titanic" when it came to running time -- "Poseidon" clocks in at 98 minutes -- because this repetitive mass of wreckage is destined to sink to the bottom of the box office, never to resurface again.
"Poseidon," Rated PG-13 for intense prolonged sequences of disaster and peril, opens nationwide Friday, May 12.
