Poseidon Misadventure?

The Poseidon Adventure is one of my top ten favourite films - for various reasons that include unforgettable performances by Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, not to mention Red Buttons, plus grime-smeared survivors leaping into water-filled inverted steam shafts. It is a movie that exceeds labels such as camp, kitsch, so-bad-it's-good, dreck or B-movie, to simply rise to the top of any list of disaster flicks from the 70s, surely one of the most viable, and riveting, genres of a very fecund period. The only film that comes close, but is truly dreck in comparison, is The Cassandra Crossing, which, starring a pre-murder O.J. Simpson, and featuring the twin themes of the bubonic plague and The Holocaust, is doomed now to be a modish curio and not a classic, thought its mix of bio-terrorism and concern with anti-semitism is still highly-charged stuff today.

So why am I so discomfited by the news that the film has been remade, and is one of the summer's biggest thrill-rides, retitled simply as Poseidon? Several elements of the new project are very promising: it is helmed by Wolfgang Petersen, director of arguably the finest film ever made about survival at sea, and the human conflict that entails (Das Boot not his lukewarm The Perfect Storm); Josh Lucas is one of the more under-rated of his generation, and looks good in the trailer; even Richard Dreyfuss, that antsy ham recently withdrawn from the London stage due to some sort of ailment, is a worthy cast member, since his admirable part in the greatest - and most watery - blockbuster of the 70s, Jaws, must surely entitle him to one last shot at such an entertainment.

And yet, and yet, warning bells, and red lights, and fog horns, keep ringing. Is it that the CGI looks suspiciously like this is Titanic Part Deux? Is it the absence of any major actors, other than the aforementioned, and instead, a cast of TV stalwarts and young guns yet to make a household name for themselves? Is it the presence of Kurt Russell, sans eyepatch? Is it the feeling that the script has airbrushed out the twin agons of an elderly couple voyaging to the Holy Land, while a tormented, nearly-excommunicated priest, vies to lead his flock to the promised land, where the hull is thinnest, and God's acetylene torch can best cut through the steel like butter?

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