As distinctly '70s as the Pet Rock or Stretch Armstrong, the disaster movie cycle derived no small amount of guiltless fun from an iron-clad formula: Large-scale bloodless apocalypse at the end of the first reel, followed by a series of over-the-hill, easily recognizable actors biting it in increasingly baroque fashion. (Personal favorite: Henry Fonda shooting himself up with giant killer bee venom—in the name of science!—in The Swarm.) Throw in a disco tune or two and/or Charo, and declare it groovy. To call these films dated is to be charitable (the notable exception is Richard Lester's Juggernaut, which, with its witty script and breezily enjoyable performances, actually works as a real movie), but there's still oodles of entertainment to be found within, all comfortably far, far away from anything remotely resembling actual tragedy. While watching, say, Robert Wagner get turned into a tux-clad fajita, remorse is not exactly the first emotion that springs to mind.

Poseidon, the mega-budgeted revamp of 1972's upside-down ocean liner opus, would most likely be a pretty lousy movie in any situation, with dialogue and characterizations that often inspire the wrong sort of giggles, but the still-vivid memories of the effects of an actual, real-world tsunami—to say nothing of the possibility of United 93 playing at the same multiplex—quickly snuff out any hopes of vicarious thrills. Aside from a solid performance by the perennially undervalued Kurt Russell, it's just a bummer, through and through.

Whatever the ethical qualms, the lean 90-minute running time, at least, is initially promising in this time of bloat, but the scenario's brevity simply permits scripter Mark Protosevich (The Cell) to double up on the clich©s: Russell is an ex-mayor AND a former firefighter, Josh Lucas is a professional gambler AND a Navy veteran, and so on. Whatever money was saved on printing out script pages is all up on the screen, certainly. Director Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot, The Perfect Storm) is an old hand at underwater claustrophobia (and to be fair, he does deliver one doozy of a sequence in a rapidly flooding ventilation shaft), but his technical savvy and queasy nods toward realism (in contrast to the wide-open spaces of the original, the hallways and staircases here are often literally packed to the rafters with corpses) ultimately scuttle any lingering hopes of escapism. Without fail, whenever the melodrama between the dwindling survivors starts getting agreeably cheese-flavored, there's a lovingly rendered glimpse of collateral damage that brings things crashing back to post-9/11 earth. The genre just wasn't made for these times.