Pun Salad

Sometimes you get lucky not believing the critics. You look (for example) at a director who's done excellent stuff before (like Wolfgang Petersen) or an perennially underrated actor (Kurt Russell), or just someone you like that you haven't seen in awhile (Richard Dreyfuss). And sometimes you get to see a pretty decent movie.

But this is not one of those times. If anything, the critics were overkind.

Everybody is just goin' through the motions here. You know the plot: big wave tips over big ship, most people die, but a plucky bunch of adventurers defy the odds to get to the bottom of the upside-down wreck. Well, some of them do; many of them wind up dead too. It doesn't make much difference, because we don't have any reason to care about any of them, it's all arbitrary and meaningless, waaaaah!

The special effects are cheesy. A big supposed-to-be-awesome opening shot of the ship is especially obvious CGI. I halfway expected to see Shrek jogging around the deck.

I was going to give it one star, which is the worst I usually give any movie I don't absolutely despise. But then I realized (a) hey, at least it was relatively short, only 98 minutes; (b) they didn't blame the big capsizing wave on global warming. So I'll add on a half star for that.