With a Sinking feeling I watched Poseidon

Several years ago I purchased a couple of those old 30s serials...one was The Green Hornet and the other was Batman and Robin. They were over the top, deliberately cheesy. Every episode in the 30 - 40 episode run had to end with a "cliffhanger" where the heroes or some innocent party was in mortal danger...which would then be resolved 30 seconds into the next episode. For instance, and I don't recall if it was the Hornet or Batman, at the conclusion of 1 episode the intrepid heroes are caught in a brutal cave-in. Seemingly 5 minutes (and in a movie, 5 minutes is a long, long time...go back and check out some disaster scene to get exactly what I mean...) of thunder and stuff falling, trapping our heroes in the cave, trapped under a stutifying array of falling stone and dust...certainly, there is no possibility they will survive! Thus endeth the episode...
So in the subsequent episode, they recreat the scene to "refresh" your memory (and there were usually a week or two between showings of episodes, so it makes sense) only this time, the scene is about 30 seconds long. After it is done falling, Batman and Robin (I think...) stand up and brush off a little bit of dust while Robin says, "Zowie, Batman! That was a close one!"
It is so cheesy, so ridiculous...but fun, too.
Now think of that scene only, instead of dropping deliberately cheesy styrofoam on their heads, you spend millions and millions of dollars to make it as "realistic" as possible. The actors are big name stars, the blood is designed to look like real blood, the bodies are meant to be completely believable (except the plastic mannequins for some inexplicable reason more closely resemble the fruit on many people's coffee tables that was there before World War I)...everything about the movie is meant to be believable, realistic, internally consistent...and millions upon millions of dollars were spent to make it look that way....then somebody emerges from under thousands of pounds of rubble, brushes off some lint and says, "Wow, audience, that was a close one!"
Welcome to Poseidon (2006) the multi-million dollar disaster epic in which mannequins that look like wax figures are next to a huge (and expensive) scene of a boat...flipping over. In which a guy whose leg is crushed by a huge lighting fixture in one scene...the rescue from which occupies 4 or more other scenes...spends the rest of the movie less injured than several people who have no encounter more violent than trying to get the first dude out of his predicament...
On the one hand, they hyper-accentuate the "reality" of all the destruction that is going on or has gone on...then have a fire hose go from being about 50' long to about 500' long, then back to 50'...draggin through an oil-fueled fire without either it or the guy hauling it even getting singed...uhm...yeah....
Or the guy who, while standing BESIDE a port hole is unable to withstand the pull of the propeller fueled winds, but when in the opening that is bending steel is able not only to withstand the wind pull but do so without using his hands which he is using to dislodge the steel and send it into the propellers...
The difference between the old serials and their stupid escapes and the lameness of this movie is clear...the serials were fun and entertaining. Do yourself a favor...don't go see Poseidon. It only encourages more stupidity.
One final thing; the deaths. It sort of made sense that most of the passengers "had" to die...that made the escape of the protagonists all the more inspiring. And from one standpoint the fairly random nature of the deaths from the party of protagonists was a nice touch, the obvious, predictable, and annoying crushing of "Lucky Larry" aside...which if you did NOT see coming, you probably also wonder how Roadrunner v Wile E. Coyote chases will turn out...and are stunned when the Roadrunner somehow eludes the fiendishly clever traps.
With that said, the "random" deaths are often pointless..Map (Valentine) sort of makes sense to make it more difficult, although since they are using the on-board "You are here" maps, it is sort of pointless...and subtly ironic that the guy who had been about to commit suicide is the guy who knocks him loose to his death, later takes an a propeller-propelled steel plate shot to the dome...and ultimately survives...that was sort of pointless...as was the death of Elena after them making the point of how hard she was trying to get to New York to see her brother and the sacrifices she was making to do so...then her death is random and accomplishes NOTHING. It is almost like the writers said, "Okay, we need a screwdriver, let's have someone wear a cross, so she should be a Mexican Catholic...once the screwdriver scene is over, she just takes up valuable screen time, so let's off her. What, there is no place to do it? Okay, I am out of ideas. Let's have 3 electrical wires trap her and kill her. That will get her out of the way."
In fact, each character other than the Mathew McConaghy (sic) look-a-like whose name I can't remember seems to be there to provide that 1 useful skill moment and then die...Kurt Russell after swimming 150 feet...Larry to clear the path...Map after showing them 1 direction...Elena after her crucifix serves as a screwdriver...and each time they die, with the exception of Russell, you are like, "huh? that was...random."
Normally I would think that was good writing, but in a movie that emphasizes the spectacular, having the deaths be random and mundane is...bizarre. And unentertaining.
Even worse, the people you root for (if you ever grow to care about any of the characters, which I seriously doubt) are the ones that die, whereas the useless (the guy who makes his money skimming drunk people or fighting spouses), the suicidal, and the people whose entire function seems to be to be a mother and wear a wet evening gown survive.
On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being only see it after gouging your eyes out with a red hot poker and 10 being own the pirated version because it is so good you can't wait for it to come out on dvd, I rate this one...maybe a 3?