Poseidon Sinks

It’s amazing that a movie centered around the Deep Blue Sea could be so…well, shallow. The remake of the 1979 films leaves out much of what made the original work, instead focusing more on random action sequences and far less on character development.

In fact, most of the characters have been toyed with to the extent that they are no longer recognizable and what we know about them is so trivial they’re just stick figures to us; empty shirts and skirts waiting for a bulk head to smash into them or a roaring fire to engulf them.

I don’t know that I have ever seen character development so clumsy and heavy handed. The movie treats it like a nuisance and tries to get it all out the way quickly and be done with it. I can almost hear the writer saying:

“I need people to dislike Lucky Larry (Kevin Dillon), I guess I’ll have him say something obnoxious. There, done with that.”

Dylan Johns and Maggie James, played by Josh Lucas and Jacinda Barrett, needed to be a love interest. So we see them meet, exchange painfully trite pickup lines, gaze at each other once or twice, and that’s it. That’s the extent of the bonding we see yet they act as though a true and time tested love has taken hold and we somehow missed it. They are literally flirting one minute and a loving couple the next, with no in-between. It’s absurd.

Kurt Russell plays Robert Ramsey. What do we know about him? Well, it’s mentioned he used to be a fireman and the Mayor of NYC. Writer Marc Protesevich proves that he loves his daughter and is a tad over protective by showing us Ramsey asking his daughter Jennifer (Emmily Rossum) to button the top button on her shirt. There, done with that! Now we all know exactly who this guy is and can get on with the business of people falling and burning.

Richard Dreyfuss, playing the obligatory, found-in-every-movie gay character, even though such a character did not exist in the original, suffers a breakup with his significant other and turns suicidal. How do we know this? We see him start to climb over a railing and prepare to leap into the water. There. Done with that character! That’s enough, don’t need to know anymore about him. Or why he changed his mind and spent the rest of the movie in a valiant struggle to survive. Oh well, throw a fat lady into a chandelier, that’s what people came to see!

So flawed is this entire film that not only are the characters paper thin, they’re just unbelievable. Josh Lucas is a gambler and spends a lot of time on cruise ships. Somehow, that makes him able to read complex maps and charts about the boat, understand how pressure hatches in bulk heads work and know exactly where there are people size openings near the propeller shafts. He never gets lost, knows all the stairwells and hatches and all the inner-working of every button and console. The Captain, on the other hand, seemed to believe that the windows in a giant ballroom would stand up to the pressures of being underwater and was shocked when they broke. I guess he should have asked the poker player if his assumption was accurate. The Captain seemed to be involved in some sort of implied relationship with the nightclub singer (from the Black Eyed Peas), but to what extent and for how long, we don’t know. And by that point don’t even care.

The premise of the movie is simple enough. A giant “rogue” wave hits the boat and turns it upside down, leaving the survivors 2 options: Follow the former mayor and the poker player on a journey to the bottom of the boat in search of escape or, stay with the Captain in the ballroom and wait for death.

So Ramsey, his daughter Jennifer and her fiancé, Dylan Johns the card shark, the state mandated gay character who serves no real purpose and a random busboy whose only backstory is that he smuggled some girl aboard for some vague reason involving a dying brother in a hospital, all head towards the bottom of the ship.

Oddly, the suicidal gay character played by Dreyfuss is immediately put in a situation where he must choose to live by sacrificing another and doesn’t hesitate for a second to kick the unnamed busboy down an elevator shaft. No tears are shed and it’s never mentioned again. But later, some character we barely know and don’t really care about comes to a bad end and they all stand around crying hysterically like they’ve known her all their lives. The thousands of deaths all around them, the throwing of a Mexican busboy down an elevator shaft, that was nothing. They were unfazed. But the death of some random person they barely know? Well, that just tears them to pieces.

I wanted to like this movie, I really did. But they changed everything about it and the result is just awful. Do you know what made the first movie work, dumb Hollywood executive? The characters.

Belle and Manny Rossen, played by Shelly Winters and Jack Albertson, had a story to tell and we cared about it. They were an older couple, still madly in love, imagining one without the other was painful. They had been through so much together; had even survived the Holocaust together. You really had to pull for either both of them to make it or neither one, so close were they.

Did the remake offer us this kind of compelling character? Oh no, we have to have the politically correct bullshit characters. A happily married and devoted couple?

No way.
They have to be turned into a single mother and some card shark that picked her up in the bar. There’s the real story for the year 2006. Single mothers and gays must have a place because no one wants to hear about devoted people that have been together for 40 years. How quaint a notion.

In the original Gene Hackman was a caring but tough priest that helped people survive and have faith. He’s history, no one likes priests anymore.

Replace him with…let’s see…hmmm….A whiny, suicidal gay guy! That’s far more compelling than a priest suffering a crisis of faith, finding his inner strength and the leader within.

This movie can’t stand on special effects alone because we’ve seen all this before, especially the sinking ship visuals which were simply straight from Titanic. It can’t stand on action alone because the action isn’t all that great.

It can’t stand on strong characters because they took great pains to remove all the characters from the original and replace them with empty, vacuous symbols of political correctness.

Know what that leaves you with? Nothing. This movie has nothing going for it, zero, nadda, nothing.

Take a lifeboat from the theater, shoot a flair and await rescue, pray for a bulkhead to the face, but don’t sit all the way through this thing. It gets my early vote for worst movie of the year and it’s hands down the most poorly written I have seen in some time.

For the record, Mark Protosevich, you should be ashamed at what you did here. It’s atrocious work and as far as I am concerned it should be the last piece of crap you’re allowed to make.