Poseidon (2006)

The string of action setpieces that makes up Wolfgang Petersen's 2006 remake of The Poseidon Adventure, including high-up tightrope walks over flames, underwater traversal of long winding corridors, and crawls through air ducts and elevator shafts, keeps the adventure, um, buoyant, but it is hard to care much given the disaster movie's, um, lack of depth: the uncharismatic group of survivors we follow through the upturned cruise liner are nothing more than faces - a sad-duck daughter of a former New York mayor, the former New York mayor, a stowaway, and a grifter of some sort - and we get no bigger picture of them or of the disaster itself - how, for instance, does the group know which way to go; do any of them have anything they care about back on land; why do they only encounter a next and a next obstacle and not, say, other people, and what is happening at all anywhere beyond their confined-space sphere of action - in the ballroom or in a rescue operation team somewhere, say, or, say, anywhere else in the world?

★★★☆☆

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