Monday 24 September 2007

Poseidon.

Take a classic disaster movie, packed to the rafters with stars and made damn-near perfect, then fill it with B-list and faded 'stars', make it far shitter and what do you have? Poseidon!

It opens with a spectacular CG shot of the ship, it really is huge. That shot alone could have financed God knows how many independent movies. I'm not going in to the plot other than to say, there's a big luxury boat and it gets flipped over in the middle of nowhere, in the deep blue sea. End of.

The fundamental problem with Poseidon is the cast. Is there a 'leading man' out there with less charisma than Josh Lucas? I don't think there is, no. He is almost unwatchable in everything he does. It's not his fault, I'm sure. I bet he's every bit as hard-working as every other actor out there. It's just that he shouldn't be given any work in the first place. He should be as hard-working, but in McDonald's.

In short… my apathy for this movie is so great, and it is riddled with so much mediocrity that I would not know where to start. Just don't watch it. You can see where the money went in this one – an estimated budget of $160m – as it's all on screen. It's just that Wolfgang Petersen hasn't got a fucking clue what to do with the visuals.

He's still coasting on two movies, in my opinion, one of which wasn't even that good (Das Boot, which is truly wonderful, and The Perfect Storm, which isn't). Hopefully Poseidon's dismal showing at the box office will be a wake-up call for him. Surely something as fine as Das Boot couldn't have been a fluke?

2 comments:

Slyde said...

This one was a hard watch for me. The Posedion Adventure is one of my all-time favorite movies, so the bar for the remake was set alittle high for me.

I love Kurt Russel, but i must agree, i'd rather have just watched the original again...

Verdant Earl said...

I guess I'm in the minority here about the original film (which I never liked). All those 70's Irwin Allen disaster films tasted the same, in my book.

That being said, I thought the remake was shit too. Remaking shit = new shit.