Poseidon

It’s a ship. It sinks. People die. Sound familiar?

That could be my entire commentary on this film, but I would be doing you a great disservice if I didn’t elaborate on the many reasons why you shouldn’t waste your money on this dreck.

The movie begins with a tired shot: The camera sweeps past the gigantic CG ship, tracking briefly alongside Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas) as he’s running. The camera sweeps again to show us (cue angelic choir) a sunset that looks as ostensibly fake as the ship. Generic music rises with tribal drums and swelling horns, regurgitating the mood if not the exact melodies of Klaus Badelt’s earlier scores, particularly “Pirates of the Caribbean.” If only this film were half as entertaining…

Christian (Mike Vogel) and Jennifer Ramsey (Emmy Rossum) are getting all googly in a suite aboard the ship just as daddy Robert (Kurt Russell) pops in. Now, I ask you, what kid these days calls their girlfriend’s dad, “Sir?” To make matters worse, the stock jock-airhead stereotype of Christian hardly seems like the type for a girl who tells her father, “I’m over your patronizing tone.”

Shortly thereafter, and I do mean “shortly,” a rogue wave from nowhere in particular, caused by nothing in particular—which is to say they don’t go into it at all—hurtles toward the ship, capsizing it. The event is so immediately forced down our throats that you suddenly realize “Titanic” and “Ghost Ship” each had more character development. The upside is, however, that Gloria (Fergie) stops singing. Up to this point, the ballroom scenes have been wasted trying to work in self-promotional spots of Fergie, the semi-rehabilitated drug addict from Black Eyed Peas. I thought we were in for another “American Dreamz”—a promotional vehicle for a pop singer thinly veiled in the guise of a badly-written movie. But no, the natural disaster spares us that travesty, only to hand us another.

So now, three hysterical women (Rossum, Jacinda Barrett and Mila Maestro), three resolute and fearless men, and Connor (Jimmy Bennett, a slightly gifted child actor who is unfortunately always relegated to being scared and resourceful at the same time), must find their way out of this mess—and by “this mess” I mean Wolfgang Petersen’s otherwise buoyant turd of a movie.

It’s amazing that few of the older women in the audience seemed to zero in on the fact that this has to be one of the most misogynistic films thus far this year. If the editor isn’t waiting on a shot long enough to catch Emmy Rossum’s cleavage, the women are panicking and waiting for the men to do something. There’s a chauvinist, Lucky Larry, who resembles the sexist pig played by Matt Dillon in “There’s Something About Mary.” Who better to play him than Matt’s brother, Kevin Dillon? It doesn’t get much more original than that in Hollywood, folks. The irony, however, is not that Lucky Larry gets his comeuppance (and not from the women, mind you), but that the story is more misogynistic than he is. It’s as if Lucky Larry was the result of the writer, director, producers and studio heads of the decidedly patriarchal motion picture industry writing themselves and their bigotry into the script. The women are portrayed so stupidly that they need Larry to show them how to use a metal rod as a lever to free Christian from some wreckage. Christian, of course, seems perfectly fine thereafter. The idiocy isn’t Larry’s… it’s the fact that the women were written to be so hopelessly unintuitive in the first place.

Because Dreyfus is the token gay, notice that he’s the only man amongst the bunch who whimpers, simpers and does little else except get burned by a gust of wind. “My name’s Valentine,” says one of the expendables before the entire ship’s manifest is whittled down to the handful of stars who are contractually obligated to survive, except one… pat yourself on the back if you guessed that one of the older, paternal figures will have to sacrifice himself. Nelson replies, “I love that name,” in case you forgot that he’s the token fag. Add this to Hollywood’s growing list of duplicitous and consistent carting out of gay stereotypes to pretend they accept them, amidst wholesale rejection of any serious depictions of homosexuality at awards time. But I digress…

I found myself in hysterics, too: When an entire room explodes, our fearless men and deeply traumatized women make it out just in the nick of time, as opposed to perhaps three or four nicks sooner. Cut to Captain Bradford (Andre Braugher) who says, “God bless us.” Was that a joke?

Then there’s the ship itself. This must be the most incompetent example of engineering ever known to man. While everything, including a fuel tank, comes unbolted and crashes through just about every bulkhead in the ship, the one grate they can’t seem to open apparently possesses the single tightly-screwed bolt in the entire vessel. When they get the Resourceful Child to slip his hand through and he does finally unscrew it, using a crucifix pendant with one end that incidentally happens to be beveled like a screwdriver, it comes out with half a turn. Now explain to me, what screw on the planet can’t be loosened by hand if it’s a half-turn away from freedom?

I’d also like to know what happened to the supposedly unbreakable glass (they make a point of it early in the film). The large ballroom is supposed to be airtight, but apparently being submerged by only a few feet has created enough hydraulic pressure to shatter these allegedly impervious windows. Bernoulli would be rolling in his grave. But wouldn’t you know it, as is customary for films like this, Nelson happens to be an architect. He makes the astute observation that the ship wasn’t designed to be capsized. No… really? There’s always a steady supply of architects and engineers on these doomed voyages to tell you something was fucked up… Where the hell do they all work? Apparently at none of the factories that assemble these manifestly shitty contraptions.

The film is so creatively bankrupt that Mr. Ramsey and Dylan lead the survivors down a path to escape through the bow thrusters only to discover—oh, snap—they might want to turn them off first. The final sacrifice comes down to these two. Will it be Dylan? Certainly plausible, because he’s the self-interested asshole who only incidentally is roped into sharing his escape strategy. He could use a good-old manufactured Act of Redemption. Or will it be Mr. Ramsey, who’s not only a father to a beautiful girl dating a guy he doesn’t like at first, but is also the oldest among the survivors (excluding the expendable homosexual)? If you saw “Armageddon,” you know where to place your bets.

Poseidon • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Running Time: 99 minutes • MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense prolonged sequences of disaster and peril. • Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures