MOVIE REVIEWS: POSEIDON

For the second week in a row a movie estimated to have cost $150-200 million seems destined to give media investors and studio executives a sinking feeling. Following last week's Mission: Impossible III, which sold far fewer tickets than expected, Wolfgang Petersen's Poseidon is likely to fulfill expectations. The only problem is that those expectations are extremely low. Analysts forecast a $20-million take and anticipate that it may not even take the top spot at the weekend box office. Reviewers have assailed it mercilessly. "You know a disaster flick is in trouble when it's only a few minutes along and you can't make up your mind over who you hope will die first," comments Jan Stuart in Newsday. Or consider the opening remarks by Claudia Puig in USA Today: "Poseidon is a sodden saga, with a script that is awash in clichés. It nearly drowns under the weight of its own soggy tedium." Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal calls it "a deeply dreadful movie -- no, a shallowly dreadful movie -- that's too unpleasant and repetitive to be entertaining, even as camp." Most critics suggest that there's hardly a story here at all. It's all "action on top of unbelievable action," writes Kyle Smith in the New York Post. Ty Burr in the Boston Globe writes that it's "as much fun as a shroud." Similarly Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times remarks that it "rings more bells than Quasimodo at noon, and all you hear is a knell." A.O. Scott in the New York Times is a bit more charitable than his colleagues, calling the movie, "pure boilerplate: a reasonably well-executed throwaway." And Eleanor Ringel Gillespie remarks in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "At heart, Poseidon is just a string of neat-o special effects in search of something that passes for a story line on which to drape itself. When the water's not rising, something heavy is falling."

12/05/2006