The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

The SS Poseidon is sailing from New York to Athens when an underwater earthquake creates a huge wave that turns the ship over. A small group of passengers do their best to survive, despite the water coming in and the fires breaking out.

I was curious to see this film, which I had often heard about. It’s trashier than I expected. There’s a shabby made-for-TV quality to it, and it has none of the big-budget grandeur of disaster classics such as The Towering Inferno. The characters are absurdly diverse “types”, including:
• a rogue preacher (Gene Hackman)
• an angry, bad-tempered cop (Ernest Borgnine) and his ex-prostitute wife (Stella Stevens)
• a gee-whiz American kid (Eric Shea) and his older sister (Pamela Sue Martin)
• a woman given no other function than to be “a fat lady” (Shelley Winters) and her thinner husband Jack Albertson (Grandpa Joe in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory)
• a nervous singer (Carol Lynley) whose band of beardy blokes doesn’t make it
• a kindly, injured waiter (Roddy McDowall)
• an absurd-looking runner (he jogs like a parody of a Carry On character), who’s too shy to have any luck with women (Red Buttons)

Meanwhile, Leslie Nielsen plays the captain. After seeing him in Airplane! and The Naked Gun, it’s strange to see him in a straight role: I kept waiting for the gags that never arrived.

The concept is good, but it’s poorly executed and poorly written. There’s a lack of dramatic tension. Too much of the film becomes a logistical challenge of getting a group of people past an obstacle or from one room to another. The ship is meant to be upside down most of the time, but it rarely looks that way. You only see it in close-up, and the lack of contextual shots mean that what you do see looks like a set. It made me respect the action sequences in James Cameron’s Titanic even more than I did already. 

Character-wise, there are sections that are unintentionally comical – ridiculous, even. Often, one person is speaking and everyone else is holding a strange facial expression, such is the lack of dynamism in the group scenes. There’s a lot of unnecessary shouting, too. And you can tell when someone’s about to die because of the conversation they have beforehand. 

Gene Hackman makes the most of the sub-standard material, but he can only do so much. 

All these points aside, it’s entertaining enough.