Poseidon Adven.., er, I mean just Poseidon, no adventure

From Aintitcoolnews, "Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here, preparing to pile on to the mediocre reviews that have been heaped upon Poseidon.
I even decided to hold out and see it on the big, juicy IMAX screen to see if that made any improvements to the festivities.
My guess is that if you decide to partake in this early entry in the summer movie season, you're going to do a lot of eye rolling. Even though you'd be sitting in the dark with no audience, your eyes will have no other choice but to roll around in their sockets in disbelief. A lot of early reviews of Poseidon have picked on various aspect of the production. The pacing is too rapid. The big "rogue" wave that topples the cruise ship comes in at about the 20-minute mark, and the film is only 100 minutes long.
But a short running time and fast pace is not necessarily a deal breaker in my book. My problem was context. In a film like United 93, in which recent history is our context (and therefore we don't need a lot of background on the characters), this is not as much of an issue. But with Poseidon, our context is given to us only on a need-to-know basis.
Everything we learn about our characters has to do with the plot. There is very little extraneous information, and every single detail given to us about the handful of survivors climbing to the top of the upside-down ship is important. This is not a good thing. It takes moments when characters might be developed (in an effort for us to give a shit about them) and turns them into, well, a walking, breathing script points. For example, Kurt Russell rises to the top as the group leader. Why him? As we find out, he used to be the mayor of New York City (making him a natural leader) and a firefighter (making his ideas about rescue the most important). Josh Lucas plays a gambler.
Well, that's not very useful; we need someone who has a detailed knowledge of ships. Not a problem, now Lucas' character is also an ex-Navy man. Okay, wait, wait. We also need someone who knows something about how structural engineering. How about Richard Dreyfuss! He plays a gay architect, who begins the film ready to commit suicide over a broken love affair, but never really volunteers for any duties that might put his life at risk to save others.
Wait, aren't there any women on the sinking boat? You bet. We have Emmy Rossum, who doesn't really serve any purpose other than to look beautiful and be Russell's daughter. And there's Jacinda Barrett as Lucas' potential love interest. The key to surviving Poseidon (the ship not the movie) is to be indispensably useful or be related to or in love with someone who is. Anyone who doesn't fit that bill is toast. And if you're an asshole named Lucky Larry (Kevin Dillon), your odds aren't too good either. It doesn't take long to figure out this formula, and it makes the movie painfully predictable. That doesn't take away from some of the awe-inspiring wave sequence and the horrific disaster footage that follows, but it doesn't help either.
Director Wolfgang Petersen has proven himself a capable action director (In the Line of Fire, Air Force One, Troy), and he has a gift for constructing tales of men attempting to survive at sea (Das Boot, The Perfect Storm), but Poseidon is a major step back for his talents and a classic example of letting the spectacle overtake the importance of the story.
You may wonder why I haven't brought up the original 1972 disaster epic The Poseidon Adventure. It's because the two films have so little in common that it's hardly worth mentioning. Gene Hackman's role for the original is essentially split in half between Lucas and Russell, and once you've done that, why bother trying to compare?
As I mentioned before, I opted to check out this film on an IMAX screen (just to be different), which did actually heighten my enjoyment of the film only slightly. You just can't beat that crazy sound system and gi-normous screen.
Poseidon is not boring, but it makes no effort to be original or cinematically significant. Striving to be a summer popcorn flick doesn't give filmmakers an excuse to be lazy. If you aren't going to try and improve on the original film or advance the disaster genre, why bother making the film at all?
These are the thoughts that filled my mind walking out of Poseidon."