Few
will accuse Wolfgang Peterson’s remake of the 1972 box-office smash of being cheesy, but few will remember the new
characters who try to escape the doomed ship, even if some of the individual
scenes are suspenseful.
Well, the 1972 adaptation of
Paul Gallico’s novel The Poseidon Adventure (there was also an NBC-TV version in 2005) is one of my favorite movies, only partly because I first saw it
when I was 7 (my first PG rating!). Was I bound to be disappointed by the
remake? Probably, but I’ll compare anyway. In each case, a big wave causes a
New Year’s Eve cruise ship to flip over, leaving the brightest among the
passengers to figure out they better start heading up to the ship’s
hull. In each case, an improbably convenient plot device—that most of the passengers
don’t figure this out—is used to whittle the cast to a manageable size.
In version one, studly preacher Gene Hackman and his brain-dead (the rest soon
to follow) counterpart, who wants to stay put, each try to persuade the passengers
to go or not. In what might be the single best scene, the majority realize
they’ve chosen unwisely when the water starts coming in; they scramble en masse
onto the Christmas tree being used as a makeshift ladder, only to see it fall
under their collective weight.
The remake inexplicably dispenses with all of
this. The group here, led by cocky gambler Josh Lucas and overprotective
dad/ex-New York mayor Kurt Russell, merely shuffle off after a brief tiff with
the captain. A rough counterpart to Hackman’s preacher, Russell’s is the best
of these new characters, who are mostly different from the old ones. (The one I
could have done without, the scaredy-girl, is preserved intact.) One thing
that’s gone is all of the women over 30. Emmy Rossum, playing Russell’s
daughter, is the default female lead. So there are no married couples. No
Shelley Winters saying, “Give this to Manny!” to her husband as she keels over.
No macho Ernest Borgnine breaking down upon losing his tart wife. All very
campy in the original, but also effective, in the same way, really, that Titanic
would be 25 years later. In terms of the basic plot, there are certain
different obstacles the group face, but it’s roughly similar, and roughly as
good, although there are too many scenes where you basically know that no one
is going to die. (For example, when you put a child in jeopardy, there’s little
true suspense.) There is one very good addition in which one character is
essentially forced to kill another to save himself. It’s a little more honest,
maybe, than the all the selflessness you see in the rest of the movie. Even the
gambler, who wants to go it alone at first, becomes a swell guy in the course
of an hour and a half. The effects are solid, but, for all the $150 million
dollars spent, not obviously superior to the $5 million original. So this seems
destined to pass as another big-budget disaster movie that will be good enough
for genre fans, but no better.
posted 8/20/13
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