James Cameron has lost it big time

Rating: 3/10 (27 August 2002)

A tragic story. And not in the sense that it made me cry. This film is pathetic. The love story is tedious, the depiction of Irish peasantry panders to the crassest stereotypes and Celine Dion's stinky theme song is just the icing an a horrible anti-cake. Somewhere along the line, around about Terminator 2 and True Lies, director James Cameron went badly astray. He became so obsessed with setting new Special Effects standards that he lost sight of characters, dramatic plausibility and any measure of emotional honesty, which are all far more essential to a film's credibility. The characters in this film are bland and uninspiring. To call them one-dimensional would be an insult to Geometry.
It's ironic that a film which cost so much to make in terms of special effects should go for the cheapest possible emotional return - Billy Zane is his usual camp, pantomime-villain self, Leonardo DiCaprio is as wet as the sea he eventually (thankfully) drowns in and even the usually reliable David Warner is flat and listless. This film gets three out of ten. And all those points are for the last hour when the ship sinks - the only good part of the film. The rest of it should be consigned to the bottom of the Atlantic and left there to rot.