Review of The Poseidon Adventure (1972) by Kyle M — 21 Jan 2015

The Poseidon Adventure tells the story of a group of passengers on a cruise ship that band together in hopes of escaping once the entire boat has capsized. It is one of those films where a new dilemma lurks around every corner so the group of survivors are constantly being tested by something different. It also, naturally, allows each one of them to have their moment in the spotlight. A lot of this feels somewhat formulaic looking back on it in 2015 but I think it worked surprisingly well in this movie that kind of set the standard that other disaster movies copy nowadays. I was also surprised how ready and willing they were to kill off characters. It did a great job of keeping the stakes raised so I wondered how many would actually survive. In fact, I kind of wish they hadn't put up the title card at the beginning detailing that there were a small number of survivors because I might have worried that no one would survive (or only one person) if they didn't tell me from the start.

The biggest difficulty I had with The Poseidon Adventure is the cast. It's not that I think any of them are bad actors, actually I like a lot of their work. But what I struggled with is that most of the actors in this film are people I grew up knowing from comedies and parodies. So it took me a long time to get into the serious tone of this film because every line felt like a joke when it came from the lips of Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Jack Albertson, and especially Leslie Nielsen. It also didn't help that some of the dialogue didn't feel natural, so I was taken out of the movie. Luckily Gene Hackman was there to lend some gravitas to the proceedings. While I certainly didn't love The Poseidon Adventure, and kind of wish it was cast differently, it did have me on the edge of my seat a few times. I'm also impressed when a film like this can surprise me, and it did more than once. It's not the greatest disaster film of all time, but it's one I can recommend because it has just enough adventure and action to distract you from the fact that Frank Drebin is the captain of the ship.