film | Gravy boat

Throwing caution to the old "bigger is better" adage, POSEIDON whittles down both the name — by two words — and the length — by nearly a half-hour! — of 1972's The Poseidon Adventure, the Irwin Allen all-star spectacular that's as noteworthy for ushering in its decade's glut of disaster flicks as it is for Shelley Winters' sublimely hammy glub-glub-glubbing in an Oscar-nominated supporting performance. Fittingly, the less-than-epic but diverting Poseidon redux probably won't be remembered as much beyond a footnote on the original's Wikipedia listing this time next year, but as summer movies go, it's lean and mean and exciting enough to redeem its harried made-for-TV exposition.

Maybe director Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot and The Perfect Storm) and screenwriter Mark Protosevich (The Cell) were a little screwed no matter how you slice it. Either they: A) drag out the set-up to the extent that it becomes apparent why the Adventure has been dropped from the title; or B) condense their character introductions and development into a perfunctory 15 minutes of forefront pablum, then cut to the big-budget chaos as quickly as possible. they've opted for the latter, doing few favors for the movie's ensuing who-lives-and-who-dies dramatic urgency in the process, so it's a very good thing that Petersen's ensemble cast blends together established actors with built-in likability — Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfuss — and semi-unknowns who're easily likable — Ladder 49's Jacinda Barrett and Alias' Mía Maestro.

Let's see. There's the brainy badass (Lucas), the single mom (Barrett, a Real World alum), the little boy (Jimmy Bennett), the sexist prick (Kevin Dillon, channeling older brother Matt from There's Something About Mary), the skittish stowaway (Maestro), the Latino cook (Freddie Rodríguez of Six Feet Under), the gay architect (Dreyfuss), the young engaged couple (The Phantom of the Opera's Emmy Rossum and Mike Vogel), and the ex-firefighter former mayor of New York City (Russell, in the most blatantly heroic role, like, ever). They're aboard a luxury New Year's cruise on the titular ocean liner when — in the first in a series of terrific and bracing action sequences — a "rogue wave" strikes, overturning the vessel and forcing this ragtag band of dwindling survivors to climb to an opening in the hull before it completely submerges. Not the best news for those billed last on the credits, if you know what i mean.

While The Poseidon Adventure peppered its story with religious allegory — Gene Hackman's recreant reverend led his flock of persevering passengers through dangerous tests of faith — Poseidon eludes highfalutin' symbolic content to concentrate on continuously supplying thrills. And they're actually thrilling, particularly an underwater race through a series of ballast tanks that'll unnerve anybody with breath-holding issues. Really, that's the moderate brilliance of the film's simple premise, and the reason why the scene in Steven Spielberg's Jaws where the shark bears into the boat and devours Robert Shaw will remain one of the niftiest movie scares for eternity: You can't escape the dark side of nature — be it in the form of an unstoppable great white or a tsunami that floods your safe haven — if you're floating helplessly in the middle of the sea. Now add a ton of turbulence by flipping the floor and the ceiling, and you've got a fine idea of Poseidon's effectively freaky capsized hell. B