Poseidon

"The stripped-down title of the disaster epic formerly known as "The Poseidon Adventure" accurately reflects the movie itself -- an early-summer vehicle that's built for speed, with scant time to develop characters before the world turns upside-down. Thanks to its simple construction, Wolfgang Petersen's large-scale liner moves reasonably well, though anyone with the faintest memory of its 1972 predecessor will wonder where most of the plot went, and the dialogue is so stilted it can honestly be said the less the better..."

"It may be cheese, but Poseidon lays out a mighty fine spread. Director Wolfgang Petersen is the -to guy for a movie about a rogue wave (The Perfect Storm) or folks trapped in a boat underwater (Das Boot). He shoots both barrels in this escapist blast. After a perfunctory character setup, Petersen hits the action button and never stops whaling on it. The plot? A 150-foot tidal wave knocks the rivets out of a cruise ship just as a New Year's Eve party commences..."

"Who better than Wolfgang Petersen, director of boats-in-peril films Das Boot and A Perfect Storm, to update the 1972 capsized-ship disaster blockbuster, The Poseidon Adventure? But the question also needs to be asked, did that movie really need to be remade? The answer: not really..."

"Nobody gets to decide whether to accept the mission in Poseidon or not; that's one of the many attractions of this excellently undemanding, swimmingly enjoyable remake of that perfectly glugging 1972 uh-oh classic, The Poseidon Adventure. No image-rehabilitating Cruise derring-do is expected from the partying cruise passengers whose lives are turned upside down. No exponentially clever twists of plot are expected by the partying audience either, except the inevitability that a few characters will perish and others will look good wet..."