“Wolfgang Petersen‘s Poseidon is a ruthlessly stripped-down update [of the 1972 original]…a slice of delicious cheese, it’s also a brutally efficient machine . Keeping only the original film’s immortal setup — a luxury liner topples over one New Year’s Eve — Petersen sends a ragtag band of outsiders scurrying onward and upward toward the hull. Only this time there’s the added incentive that the ship happens to be sinking at an alarming speed, so every second counts. In recent years we’ve grown accustomed to endless, bloated back-stories and pointless subplots in big-budget movies of this size, so it’s downright jarring when a rogue wave knocks over the S.S. Poseidon less than 18 minutes into the picture. Not counting closing credits, the film runs barely an hour and a half. In other words, if you started watching this movie and Titanic at the exact same time, Poseidon would already be over long before anyone in Mr. Cameron’s opus even spotted the iceberg.” — Sean Burns, Philadelphia Weekly