Fifteen minutes into Posiedon the boat gets flipped upside down. Then, over the course of the next hour and twenty minutes, every character in the film has their personalities turned upside down. I don’t know whom to credit (or blame as the case may be) for this development, director Wolfgang Peterson or screenwriter Mark Protosevich, but either way this plot-by-numbers is just no way to make a movie. I guess somebody thought it would be incredibly interesting and exciting if what happens to the boat is a metaphor for what happens to the characters. And that’s not actually unreasonable. The problem only arises because the film is little more than an exercise in seeing how many things the filmmakers can turn upside down.
Let’s count the ways. The loner hero (Josh Lucas, their character names are completely irrelevant) will, by the end of the film, be in love and wanting to start a family. The old gay man ready to die (Richard Dreyfuss) will discover a wonderful desire to live life to the fullest. A young woman (Emmy Rossum) who had written off her father as an ineffectual and distant dictator will finally realize just how much he really does love her. And then we have Lucky Larry (Kevin Dillon playing Johnny Drama) who, before very long, discovers that he’s pretty damn unlucky.
See, the problem here is not so much that these people have had their lives turned upside down by the capsizing of the boat (that seems reasonable and somewhat logical) but rather that each character only has one trait. And reversing that one trait over the course of one hundred minutes is simply far too shallow (forgive me the pun) a character progression. Especially considering that anyone who’s ever seen a movie before in their lives would be able to figure out that the loner would fall in love or that the spiteful daughter would realize how much her father loves or that the idiotic Lucky Larry would prove to be unlucky. I’m not asking for Shakespeare but come on.
The only people that could possibly enjoy watching this film are those that really really like watching computer-generated fire. More so even than water, Poseidon is filled to bursting with scenes about or involving fire. It’s got flash fires, slow-burning fires, big fires, small fires, columns of fire, water on fire and even super-heated air that “burns your lungs like rice paper.” And most of this fire looks pretty damn cool. But then, of course, the silly humans that are trying to evade the fire have to do their thing and pretty soon you’ve got people diving headfirst (headfirst!) into a pool of burning oil and water or some such nonsense.
There are worse films (X-Men III, The Da Vinci Code, etc.) out there at the moment but hardly any that are this joyless. Blowing shit up and people holding their breath as they swim through flooded corridors whose length is unknown should be a lot more campy fun than this. It just looks like everyone involved was doing it for the paycheck.
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