We all hope we would act bravely in a disaster -- that we'd choose to risk all to save our loved ones, ourselves, and if possible strangers. Knowing a film of Poseidon's caliber would be made about your exploits, however, you might decide to go down without a fight. Audience members will definitely be rooting for everyone to expire quickly so the perfunctory update of producer Irwin Allen's 1972 flick The Poseidon Adventure can end. 

When a rogue wave causes a sleek ocean liner to go belly up in the North Atlantic on New Year's Eve, a small group of passengers boldly try to escape. Anyone with fond memories of watching the original -- noteworthy for its cutting-edge special effects and campy performances -- will definitely feel trapped below, or rather above, decks on the overturned vessel. It's not just that we’ve become inured to special effects extravaganzas. Your average episode of The Love Boat had more meaningful drama, emotion, and peril.

The realization that you haven't booked a first-class passage yet won't be able to enjoy the cheap thrills of riding in steerage comes quickly. Expository scenes introducing the players are either cursory or nonsensical. We meet a professional gambler (Josh Lucas), a Latina stowaway (Mia Maestro), a former fireman and ex mayor of  New York (Kurt Russell), his daughter and her fiancée (Emmy Rossum and Mike Vogel), a single mother and her son (Jacinda Barrett and Jimmy Bennett), and a gay architect (Richard Dreyfuss) distraught over being dumped by his lover.  A waiter (Freddie Rodriguez) and a sexist lout (Kevin Dillon) also refuse to wait around and drown. 

Portraying the ship's Captain, Andre Braugher, with his stentorian delivery, appears to have wandered onto the soundstage while making another movie -- perhaps a musical or a Shakespeare tragedy. Because he stays behind with the majority of passengers in the ballroom, his fate is sealed early on. The bonds forged between members of the escaping party, as they scamper upward over corpses and through both fiery and watery chaos, are soggy.

While scintillating dialogue isn't mandatory, coherence and smatterings of self-reflexive humor aren’t too much to ask for. When Russell's public servant declares "There's nothing fair about who lives and who dies," it sounds like the filmmakers’ excuse for not making the audience care who makes it. Despite being annoying, even by movie kid standards, I wanted the boy to survive until a shamelessly manipulative sequence during which he’s trapped in a cage rapidly filling with water and Lucas’ hero swims into action. The less said about the acting the better. 

Director Wolfgang Petersen received two Oscar nominations for 1982's Das Boot, which ranks as one of the best ever movies set on a seagoing vessel. Since then he's made respectable action-dramas like Air Force One and The Perfect Storm, plus the Chippendales historical epic Troy. Poseidon  looks as if it were directed by a master electrician who only took pleasure in making the ship's extensive lighting system keep on twitching.  A $175 million budget apparently doesn't ensure the boat won't occasionally look like a toy model.  And the fact that shots aren't held for very long suggests the cinematographer and editor lack confidence. Poseidon being no great shakes technically is disappointing because Irwin Allen's string of disaster movies, including The Towering Inferno, were groundbreaking in this respect.   

It still should be remembered that while the 1970s are considered a great decade for American films, for every Godfather there were two or three Poseidon Adventures. Source material--good, bad, or in between -- does not over-determine quality.  A more profound perspective is gained by noting that the opening film at the recent Tribeca Film Festival was United 93, a powerful memorial to those who died on 9/11, and Poseidon closed the festival. Comparing these stories of bravery and self-sacrifice, makes the latter seem trivial in the extreme.

(Released by Warner Bros. and rated "PG-13" for intense and prolonged sequences of disaster and peril.)