Coverage:
by
Laurence Washington

Proving once again that Hollywood wouldn’t know an original idea even if it washed up to their studio doors comes "Poseidon" — a listless remake of the 1972 disaster flick about a luxury liner that never learned to do anything except capsize and kill a bunch of New Year’s Eve revelers. As with the original film (The Poseidon Adventure), with no explanation what so ever, a giant tidal wave suddenly appears in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and flips the luxury cruise ship upside down. A small group of survivors band together, and despite the captain’s (Andre Braugher) orders, risk life and limb climbing up to the bottom of the flipped ship in hopes of exiting through the ship’s hull made of state-of-the-art metal. "Poseidon’s" premise could have been better written by any first year community college film student as the audience doesn’t give a hoot in hell about the survivors – a group of usual suspects in this type of flick. There’s the dad (Kurt Russell), who doesn’t approve of his daughter’s cocky fiancée, a single mom with a precocious 8-year-old, and an anxious stowaway. Several other meaningless characters round off the band of survivors. The small band is led by a professional gambler named John Dylan (Josh Lucas) who prefers to test the odds of climbing through the maze of burning wreckage than staying in the ship’s ballroom waiting to be rescued. Never mind the other’s names, they’re just around long enough to advance the plot as they die on cue among the maze of twisted steel in the upside-down wreckage. I suppose Hollywood keeps cranking out these remakes and sequels because there’s a whole generation who have never seen the original. So I won’t ruin the ending. However, my idea to freshen up Poseidon’s stale plot is to first cast Andre Braugher as the lead character, since he does a better acting job than anyone else in the current cast. Next, since this is the third remake, I’d have all three Poseidons on the bottom of the ocean on top of each other. Then I’d then have the ships discovered by Captain Marko Ramius (Sean Connery) from "The Hunt For Red October," who, through no fault of his own, accidentally fired a nuclear missile during a war game exercise causing a huge tidal wave that capsized the Poseidons in the first place. But Ramius and his men, being the heroes, will actually rescue all the poor Americans inside the sunken ocean liners – which will look great on the front page of Pravda. Oh never mind. That would be too much fun for the audience and too much thinking for Hollywood.