I don't understand our preoccupation with disaster movies. "Twister." "The Core." "Deep Impact." It's always the same; lots of people are killed or threatened by a hostile physical environment. And though you can basically interchange the titles for these movies, and they still manage to get made and sell tickets.\nWith that in mind, I'm not going to bother ripping apart a movie that's about an escape from an overturned cruise ship. There's no point in acknowledging that it's a remake of a 1972 film; that just points out that stupidity spans decades in the film industry. \nInstead, I'm going to accept a movie like "Poseidon" for what it is - idiotic - and I'm going to move on, cause I'm OK with that.\n"Poseidon" is directed by Wolfgang Petersen, a man whose career has been a pendulum swing between sucks and awesome. Yeah, he made "Das Boot," but he also made "The Perfect Storm" and "Troy."\nHis current film falls right in the middle. The back-story is nonexistent and the acting is mailed in -- flipping the ship over is explained by 30 seconds of monologue about a "deadly rogue wave" -- but again, you knew it was going to be like this.\nAnd its better that way.Anyone who will buy a ticket to something like this isn't interested in why Kurt Russell is the de facto leader of the surviving passengers it doesn't matter that he was a hero firefighter and the former mayor of New York; the film says so, so he just is. And again, I couldn't care less about Richard Dreyfuss' cheating homosexual lover, or if lone-wolf Josh Lucas is a cardshark with a heart of gold. What evens "Poseidon" out and makes it worth watching is its chaos. Its disaster. I mean, come on. The fucking movie is about an upside-down cruise ship that's sinking into the ocean. It's pretty easy to make that marginally entertaining, so enough with the talk and get to ship-flipping.\nPetersen recognizes this, keeps the bullshit to a minimum, and gets right to the action. \nPretty soon, that rogue wave catches an amazingly inept ship's crew completely off-guard, and everything is turned on its head. Kind of like in bizarro-world.\nWhen somebody dies - and the movie doesn't go long without that happening because almost everybody does - they die hard. You don't just fall down an elevator shaft in "Poseidon," your dumb ass falls, gets impaled by metal spikes and is sandwiched by the elevator car too. You don't just slip off of wreckage to fall hundreds of feet into jagged furniture, you also get totally rocked by a free-falling engine roughly the size of a Volkswagen Bus. Spoiler: that's how Kevin Dillon dies. He sucks, so you'll cheer.\nThese scenes are ridiculous and awesome at the same time, and thankfully, there are a lot of them. I'm not going to warn anyone to stay away from this film; you know what it is, and you know what you'll be getting yourself into. It's retarded, mindless drivel that plays to the moron in all of us but is still marginally fun. If you want to turn your brain off for an hour and a half and don't have any pot handy, go see "Poseidon," because there have been worse summer blockbusters.
-- Matt McMullan
