Mark Hanlon
Occupation
Filmmaker
Ghost Ship Review
OK
Ghost Ship opens with one of the most gruesome, gratuitous, and swiftest slaughters in recent memory. Without warning, dozens of passengers aboard a luxurious Italian luxury liner are sliced in half by a makeshift wire device running from the bow of the ship to the stern. The effect - and the ensuing bloody panic - is pretty cool, even if I still can't quite figure out how it worked. The entire sequence doesn't justify you paying to see Ship, but it does mean you should arrive on time if indeed you opt to go.
Asking the rest of the film to live up to such a ghastly opening is like asking a rinky-dink tugboat to tow a mammoth ocean liner across the ocean. Ironically, that's exactly what Ghost Ship does. Sean Murphy (Gabriel Byrne) owns the tugboat in question, and he employs "the best damn salvage crew in the business." In reality, they're a tough-talking, hard-drinking cast of carefully handpicked racial stereotypes, from an African-American first mate (Isaiah Washington) to a Mexican engineer (Alex Dimitriades) to an Italian salvage team leader (Julianna Margulies), who's a female, to boot.
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