Avis Metacritic

It's a buoyant, old-wave disaster pic for a generation of well-conditioned thrill seekers charmed by the revelation that Richard Dreyfuss really is the Red Buttons of our day.

You'll end up entertained if you forgive the cliches and let Petersen grab you with the visuals.

Among the willing cast, only Jacinda Barrett and topliners Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfuss manage, just barely, to suggest a third dimension to the script's cursory character sketches. But that won't matter to audiences craving a disaster thrill ride.

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.

Poseidon is devoid of anything that might conjure up memories of the Winslet/DiCaprio coupling. Its straightforward action/adventure approach is both a strength and a weakness.

The effects are terrific, from the two-and-a-half-minute opening sequence that tracks around the brilliantly lit liner from below, above and round about, to some amazing exterior shots of the groaning vessel rolling around in the churning sea like a giant, wounded whale.

"Titanic" without the metaphors, the class-consciousness, the love story, or anything resembling a theme, Poseidon invests so little in its screenplay that it might as well be an episode of "The Love Boat" gone horribly awry.

There is nothing wrong with the performances. All of the actors are professionals, although none have as much fun as Shelley Winters, who is the actor everyone remembers from the 1972 movie.

At least Poseidon takes care to dispatch the Black Eyed Peas' Stacy Ferguson who, as the shipboard entertainer, sings what may be the worst song ever written, reprised over the end credits.

An utterly empty-skulled genre mechanism and nothing more.