‘Poseidon’ succeeds by eschewing imitation

In theaters

POSEIDON, directed by Wolfgang Petersen, written by Mark Protosevich, 99 minutes, rated PG-13.

Wolfgang Petersen’s “Poseidon” answers one of the more recent, trickier questions to be lobbed out of Hollywood: How do you replace the heroic sight of Shelley Winters – breath held longer than David Blaine could fathom, panties showing, legs kicking, weight on the rise – skimming through a watery deep in an effort to save the remaining passengers of 1972’s “The Poseidon Adventure”?

More troubling for Petersen, how do you top her character’s dramatic death? The director’s shrewd answer is that you don’t even try. That is one scene that is so indelibly ensconced in pop culture lore, it’s best left untouched.

Petersen plays that even hand throughout. He never goes for the look or the feel of its predecessor, which was the right choice. When you’re remaking a camp classic, as Petersen is, it’s likely best to court as few

comparisons as possible.

With no time or patience for any discernible character development, this new “Poseidon” rails forward. It’s pure popcorn bombast. Predictably, the film is good-looking, though rolled in plenty of ham and cheese. This is mostly due to the smoldering, bullet-biting, crazy-eyed performance given by Josh Lucas. Here, as gambler Dylan Johns, Lucas is passionately faux-intense, which proves perfect for a movie that courts the same sensibility.

In the film, a huge, rogue wave overcomes the Poseidon on New Year’s Eve, capsizing the ship while sending passengers and crew on a deadly journey into the abyss. The short of it goes like this: Johns isn’t about to seal himself in the grand ballroom, where many survivors are being held by the ship’s captain (Andre Braugher) until help arrives. Johns wants out, which means finding a way up to the ship’s hull, through the propellers and into the comparative safety of the open sea.

Several join him, including former New York City mayor Robert Ramsay (Kurt Russell, dependable as ever), Ramsay’s daughter, Jennifer (Emmy Rossum), her fiance, Christian (Mike Vogel), and stowaway Elena (Mia Maestro), who is claustrophobic in ways that right now probably isn’t the best time to be claustrophobic. Suicidal architect Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss), as well as mother and son, Molly and Conor (Jacinda Barrett, Jimmy Bennett), also add dice to the film, which enjoys a fetish for giant fire balls roiling toward the heavens and the threat of drowning at every turn.

As the body count mounts and the pressure to flee the ship becomes white hot, the cast spends most of the movie soaking wet. The good news is that the movie doesn’t leave them that way, at least not figuratively. “Poseidon” may not rise to the level of the best films made by disaster king, Irwin Allen, whose “The Poseidon Adventure” and “Earthquake” were re-released on DVD last week, but it is lean and it is tight, with Petersen offering audiences a no-nonsense version that’s as heavy on all the special effects a $160 million budget can buy.

Grade: B

On DVD

THE WHITE COUNTESS, directed by James Ivory, written by Kazuro Ishiguro, 135 minutes, rated PG-13.

The last Merchant-Ivory film, “The White Countess,” doesn’t allow the duo to go out on the high note they deserved. Instead, it completes what has been a gradual slide into mediocrity ever since their best effort, “The Remains of the Day,” was nominated for eight Academy Awards in 1993 but failed to win a single one.

With the exception of “Le Divorce,” a so-so movie that found a measure of life and looseness along the streets of present-day Paris (not exactly difficult to do), the films that followed “Day,” “Jefferson in Paris,” “Surviving Picasso,” “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries,” “The Golden Bowl” and “The Mystic Masseur,” were so arch and static, they never came together. They lacked what made “Remains of the Day,” “Howard’s End,” “A Room with a View,” “The Bostonians” and “Maurice” so vital – a deep bond with the characters, as well as a pace that gathered emotional intensity.

“The White Countess” follows suit. Set in 1936, the film stars Natasha Richardson as Sofia, a widowed Russian countess exiled to Shanghai who becomes a taxi dancer to pay the rent for her beloved daughter (Madeleine Day) and her difficult family (Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgrave, Madeleine Potter, John Wood). Circumstances lead her to Todd Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), a blind American diplomat with a troubled past who hires Sofia to be the hostess of his swank nightclub.

Before war begins, the club is a success, though the movie isn’t. In spite of its fine performances and beautiful cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Yiu-Fai Lai, it fails to generate a spark. The movie is designed to prevent its leads from connecting emotionally until the last possible moment, when it’s too late to care. Long stretches sag beneath a sluggish pace sandbagged by a bloated running time.

In the end, the movie underscores that what Merchant-Ivory lost over the past decade was their connection to people. Their interest in society, manners and class differences became so great that it overcame them and their work. They no longer were making movies about people. Instead, they were making movies about a lost and artificial ideal.

Grade: C

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews, which appear Mondays in Discovering, Fridays in Happening, and Weekends in Television. He may be reached at Christopher@weekinrewind.com.