Poseidon is a perfectly serviceable disaster flick, but it's remarkable only for the extent to which it's unremarkable. It holds steadfast to the same mores which defined the original Poseidon Adventure. They were already out of date then, in 1972, and I can't imagine what made Warner Bros. think that they're back in style.

There are, I suppose, "spoilers" ahead, but only if you've never seen a disaster movie before. As the passengers on a swank luxury liner count down the seconds to midnight one New Year's Eve, their ship is overwhelmed and overturned by a gigantic "rogue wave".

In a Hollywood version of an exercise in game theory's prisoner's dilemma, ten passengers decide that they're going to ignore the captain's command to stay put in the "airtight" ballroom and wait to be rescued. There's a likable gambler (Josh Lucas), an unlikable gambler (Matt Dillon), a mother-son pair (Jacinda Barrett and Jimmy Bennett), a former mayor of New York (Kurt Russell), his recently engaged daughter and her fiancé (Emmy Rossum and Mike Vogel), a stowaway (Mia Maestro), a Latino waiter (Freddie Rodriguez), and a suicidal architect (Richard Dreyfuss).

Their subsequent attempt to reach the hull of the ship and safety lends itself to a satisfying, if somewhat predictable, game of Who's Going To Die Next? The non-white characters, of course, and the drunk; and finally, in a heroic moment of self-sacrifice, the alpha male who's past his prime. This leaves two white, affluent "family units" to tell the Poseidon's tragic tale of woe. And Richard Dreyfuss, who I suppose has too much star power to be killed off.

Or perhaps it's an olive branch extended to the gay rights movement by Hollywood that last year failed to reward Brokeback Mountain with the Best Picture Oscar - we're told in passing that Dreyfuss' Richard Nelson is gay. Thank God for small favors, or too little too late? Meanwhile, they sure did "miss the boat" (!) with the burgeoning immigrant rights movement.

And so once again it's the rugged individual male dragging the women and children to safety. Just once, just once I'd like to see a female character taking matters into her own hands in one of these films instead of slowing everything down by sobbing hysterically all the way.

The effects are uninspired, but well-rendered, and Poseidon's relatively short 99-minute runtime moves at a mercifully brisk pace. But it's nothing we haven't seen before, and it's more interesting for what it doesn't do than what it does, namely, demonstrate that someone in Hollywood knows that there's a world beyond yonder hills that's changed a mite bit since the Warners rolled into town in 1918.