Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979)

There are not a lot of positives that come from Beyond the Poseidon Adventure save for, I must admit, a pretty cool-sounding title.  Although, in the interest of accuracy, I will point out that it is a little misleading.  The characters in this movie, don’t really go beyond what happened in The Poseidon Adventure; they’re more like the next adventure.  Perhaps, a more accurate title might have been The Next Poseidon Adventure, or since this is basically the same movie as the first one, Poseidon Adventure Again!

Well, let’s get into the movie (what there is of it) so you can see what I mean.  On the morning that the survivors of the last Poseidon Adventure are rescued and spirited off by helicopter, a tug boat led by Mike Turner (Michael Caine) sees the fleeing helicopter and then spots the still floating wreckage.  He and his crew decide that since they lost their cargo in the same Tsunami that capsized the Poseidon, they’ll claim salvage rights.  Unfortunately, they are descended upon by evil pirates, led by a pretty scary Telly Savalas, who wants a valuable McGuffin that is hiding somewhere in the ship’s hold.  They fight it out, people are trapped, fires, explosions, water, blah blah blah.

If you know that original at all, you can see that this is basically the same set-up as the first movie.  A lot of big stars – in this case Michael Caine, Karl Malden, Sally Field, Mark Harmon, Peter Boyle, Slim Pickens, Jack Warden, Shirley Knight, Angela Cartwright – are paid money to stand around dripping wet while they are accosted by half-baked special effects and an even more half-baked script.  Some die, some don’t.  Their fate falls to the rules of the Hollywood Celebrity Food Chain – the bigger your paycheck, the more likely you are to survive.

So, through the 114 agonizing minutes that this movie was stealing from my life, I had a thought.  Maybe to fit a more accurate title, the movie could start with Michael Caine’s boat riding up to the wreckage and then passing by it.  Caine gives a good English salute and mutters “Rest well, good lady.”  Then he takes his tugboat literally beyond the Poseidon as we see the ship sinking beneath the water over his shoulder.  Then these wonderful actors could go beyond this drivel and onto and adventure that was worth their time.  Just a thought.