Poseidon (2006)

Poseidon is a great example of movies as commodities. It has no identity or soul; manufactured as efficiently as a room deodorizer or paper towels. It's dreadful, pointless, mindless horseshit. If the people who made this turd could have made a fortune more easily selling bogus dick-enlarging pills, they would have. Because they sure as hell didn't make this for any reason other than to rip us off. And believe me, those dick pills are bogus. Not a God damn one of them does any good, although one kind made my uvula swell with white pustules. That was sort of cool.

This isn't lazy filmmaking, and it's not incompetence. It's just that pricks like the people behind Poseidon should have government jobs. They go about moviemaking the way a fat, bored DMV clerk goes about issuing license plates: a lot of laboring over something rote and mechanical, followed by hours and hours of self-congratulations over achieving such mediocrity and a belief that nobody else can do what they do. I swear to God, the cliche-heavy script was developed by submitting check-marked forms, or by Scantron. Fill in bubble A if a pretty girl screams until a man rescues her. Fill in bubble B if an A-type macho guy sacrifices himself for the sake of others. Fill in bubble C if the stereotypically gay guy speaks his lines with a fey lilt. Hollywood spent $160 million on this movie, and at least $150 million of that had to be for Number 2 pencils.

Just as in James Joyce's "The Dead," the story begins with a procession of ensemble characters entering. "The Dead" handles its ensemble with such elegance and grace that it's a model for introducing several complex plots. Poseidon, of course, chose to go another route. That is, by ignoring what works and instead using The Love Boat as its template. In fact, Poseidon is like the ultimate Love Boat episode: It has a stampede of B-list actors like Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, Kevin Dillon and The Real World's Jacinda Barrett on board for cheap paychecks and the ego-gratification of nominally still being stars; it has a luxurious cruise ship setting; each character has his or her own cornball issue to resolve; and the captain is a clueless blowhard.

When tragedy strikes, most everyone dies a gruesome death, which only happened in the Love Boatepisodes of my dreams. Well, all except that little minx Vicki. What I would have given to be the shorts she lovingly stuffed her fat ass into each week. Anyway, in Poseidon a rogue wave flips the boat over and floods most of it. The only thing lovingly done in this movie are the shots of corpses floating about. And holy shit, there are are a lot of those shots. Maybe about 90 too many. In the first act. And once the boat is upside down, you'll think you're stuck in some sort of 80s MTV hell showing that fucking Lionel Richie video on a loop.

Josh Lucas (the poor-man's Matthew McConaughey) joins forces with Russell, Barrett, Dreyfuss, Emmy Rossum and Jimmy Bennett (as the incredibly whiny little kid who can't act his way out of a paper bag, but did audition his way into a pile of shit). With Lucas leading, they are willing to risk the well-being of everyone else in order to make their way out of the ship. I wish I could tell you something interesting about these people, but all I really know is that the men were incredibly macho and brave, the girls screamed and cried a lot, and the little boy got a rod shoved up his ass very early on and never was able to dislodge it. Oh, and Lucas conveniently had extremely detailed knowledge of cruise ship architecture because he was once in the Navy. Yeah, right.

As the camera panned past more and more dead people bobbing around, I kept thinking some of them must have been more interesting than the ones who survived. I mean, all the fancy-ass special effects in the world mean zilch when the people saved by them are such dull pricks. Once again, it appears that a screenwriter and director were unable to create characters more interesting than they, with their limited brains, are. Hooray! A band of yuppies survive and return to society to drive SUVs, shop at outlet malls and eat at Chili's! What in the world would we have done without these deep and profound individuals? Let's all celebrate with an Awesome Blossom.

The escape and survival (oh, they do escape, I hope I didn't spoil the surprise for anyone), becomes a tedious adventure in near-escapes, convenient and improbable solutions, but almost no emotion or genuine danger. The loss of life is sterile and the sadness of thousands of people dying is forgotten in the celebration that five assholes didn't. That sounds like Hollywood, all right.

Special effects really aren't so special. They're computer-generated, the product of a lot of labor and technology, but in a case like Poseidon just an imitation of reality. It takes far less imagination, genius or inspiration than money to create tidal waves, giant model boats and a shitload of flooding. It's not like it takes a storyteller to make a digital wave, and do you go to the movies to see storytelling or what computers will do next?

Once again those grassfuckers in Hollywood borrowed a ton of money from us, the moviegoing public, to produce a massive, boring epic, then ask us to pay it back at ten bucks a pop and congratulate them for not even doing something new. I guess Director Wolfgang Pterson wants us to feel as though we are practically right there. To be fair, I did feel drenched afterward. Because I got hosed. One Finger for the turd in a toilet disaster Poseidon.