Poseidon 2006

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: Neither bad enough to really laugh at nor good enough to be truly exciting, Poseidon just sits there, occasionally gripping, but only fleetingly. It's a bland spectacle. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: We've sailed these waters before. Poseidon has been reimagined, if that's the word for it, in an impersonal, Palm Piloted manner, though not without its share of unintended laughs. Read more

J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: As enjoyably silly as the original. Read more

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: Poseidon betrays a studio mindset that can only hasten the current erosion of movie attendance -- skimping on human content while betting heedlessly on boom boom boom and gurgle gurgle gurgle. Read more

Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times: By the end, you won't care who lives or dies, and you'll suspect the filmmakers didn't either. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: An experience that's exciting and nerve-racking in the moment, but that, in the end, leaves audiences with a lonely walk back to the car. Read more

Richard Roeper, Ebert & Roeper: ... a waterlogged, unnecessary re-imagining of the cheesy blockbuster from the Seventies heyday of disaster films. Read more

Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 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. Read more

Scott Tobias, AV Club: Titanic without the metaphors, the class-consciousness, the love story, or anything resembling a theme, Poseidon invests so little in its screenplay that it might as well be an episode of The Love Boat gone horribly awry. Read more

Bill Muller, Arizona Republic: The movie is filled with flimsy characters with lives summed up in a tossed-off line or two. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: There will be people who won't go to United 93 because they think it will be depressing yet will go to Poseidon expecting an exciting night at the movies, and I guess I don't understand how their brains work. Read more

Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times: It's Das Perfect Boot -- with the characters compressed to wafers. And I mean that both ways. Read more

Amy Biancolli, Houston Chronicle: If The Poseidon Adventure was pure camp classic, Wolfgang Petersen's uninspired re-do succeeds at neither -- it's not camp and it's not classic. Read more

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: The relative briskness of Poseidon ensures that things won't get bogged down. If a sequence is dull, you can be sure it will soon be replaced by another, and another. Read more

Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post: While the ship's survivors are driven to live, Poseidon is never character-driven enough to make us care. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: Watered-down in every way imaginable, Poseidon capsizes under the very large load of corn it carries. Read more

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: [An] excellently undemanding, swimmingly enjoyable remake. Read more

Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press: You can turn off your mind in Poseidon, just don't expect to relax and float downstream; you'll more likely be holding on to your seat like a flotation cushion. Read more

Philip Wuntch, Dallas Morning News: You will definitely gasp and gulp while watching the new film. But, sadly, these reactions won't be traced to the expert effects. Instead, you'll find yourself gasping and gulping at the incredibly lame dialogue. Read more

Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly: If the prospect of expiring horribly strikes you as a rather extreme way of growing backbone and getting life plans back on track, you should know that Poseidon is a movie with absolutely no sense of humor. Read more

Jan Stuart, Newsday: Poseidon is a great leveler of humanity: It renders everyone in the picture eminently disposable and everyone in the audience equally bankrupt for bearing witness. Read more

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: As a humanist, I applaud the respect for life, but I miss the campy fun. The movie is, in all senses, a big downer. Read more

Christy Lemire, Associated Press: 'There's got to be a morning after,' went the Oscar-winning song from the original. In Poseidon, daylight can't come soon enough. Read more

Lisa Rose, Newark Star-Ledger: Poseidon doesn't say much about society today, except that Hollywood continues to pour buckets of money into frivolous projects. Read more

Jack Mathews, New York Daily News: Where the first film had to rely on stunt work and character conflicts, the remake is action on top of unbelievable action. Read more

Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: So what if it's not United 93? It's about the spectacularly perilous journey, not the people making it, not some message about an under-regulated industry and accidents waiting to happen. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: Petersen sets out to give us a group of undeveloped stock characters and a bunch of cheap thrills, and that's what he delivers. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: Petersen's heart isn't in it. He is too wise a director to think this is first-rate material, and too good a director to turn it into enjoyable trash. Read more

Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com: Poseidon, which cost some $160 million to make, certainly qualifies as a big movie. But it's the kind of 'big' that you forget almost as soon as you've left the theater. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: Relying on empty spectacle rather than drama, Poseidon sinks faster than a topsy-turvy cruise ship. Read more

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Read more

Rick Groen, Globe and Mail: Petersen definitely brings a nautical pedigree to the gig -- the man knows from water. He's also wise enough to retain only the essentials from the '72 original, just the title ship and the rogue wave that did it in. Read more

Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star: There's never any doubt that some of these uninteresting people will make the passage through hell to the hull, it's only a question of which ones. And whether we'll still be there to see whom. Read more

Nick Funnell, Time Out: Petersen's expert direction ensures it remains gripping, keeping the tension ratcheted right up and commendably steering it all home within 100 minutes. Read more

Claudia Puig, USA Today: Poseidon is a sodden saga, with a script that is awash in cliches. It nearly drowns under the weight of its own soggy tedium. Read more

Brian Lowry, Variety: Wolfgang Petersen's large-scale liner moves reasonably well, though anyone with the faintest memory of its 1972 predecessor will wonder where most of the plot went, and the dialogue is so stilted it can honestly be said the less the better. Read more

Michael Atkinson, Village Voice: An utterly empty-skulled genre mechanism and nothing more. Read more

Stephen Hunter, Washington Post: Poseidon isn't cute, funny, warm, nice, inspirational or uplifting. It's about the incredible labor of survival in a world turned totally sociopathic in an instant. Read more