If it ain't broke.......

This is Josh Lucas, my future husband, in a still from the new movie Poseidon, which I had the chance to see at the Tribeca Film Festival. I love Josh in spite of the fact that he's in one of the worse movies of the summer.

Let me just say that I have no problem with remakes, as long as there is a good reason for re-making the picture. Personally, with all the screenwriters out there struggling to get deals, I think it's stupid to keep churning out high budget remakes but what do I know. I work as an Executive Secretary not a studio executive.

Sometimes with a remake, particularly if it's based on a book, you have a chance to take a different take on it like Postman Always Rings Twice or the tv version of From Here to Eternity that was 6 hours long.

But remaking The Poseidon Adventure? Twice, if you include the 4 hour CBS mini-series. I have fond memories of the first time I saw The Poseidon Adventure. We had just gotten cable tv and it was on HBO. I thought it was wonderful, and scary. At the time, in the seventies, the disaster movie was incredibly popular. Remember Airport? Towering Inferno? Earthquake?

The things I remember about the original movie besides Pamela Sue Martin's hot pants, and the Mad magazine spoof were Shelley Winters, as the former swim champion, swimming to her death, and Gene Hackman as the defrocked priest challenging God as he opened a hatch. The two things I'm going to take away from this version are how hot Josh Lucas and Kurt Russell are, and the weird moment Andre Braugher and Fergie from The Black Eyed Peas have, which comes out of nowhere, as if the director realized that they were too well known not to have something.

Yes, the special effects are great, just as they were in Titanic, but there is no character development. And you can pretty much figure out who is going to be the next to get killed. I have no idea why Richard Dreyfuss is in this movie, unless he has kids in college. Emmy Rossum plays her role pretty much the same way she did Christine in Phantom. Kurt Russell is heroic as always, and did I mention Josh Lucas is hot?

I hate to say it, but save your money and go see X-Men or rent the original film.