After all, a spot of unscheduled vomiting while sightseeing up a Norwegian fjord, or being forced to run up the gastric flag while cruising the Med, is as nothing compared with the grim fate faced by the passengers and crew aboard palatial liner Poseidon (12, seen at Dundee Odeon).

When this state-of-the-art vessel is capsized by a gigantic freak wave, 99% of those aboard end up sleeping with the fishes.

As for the few motley survivors, their ordeal is just beginning. They must battle their way through a hazardous, upside-down labyrinth full of flames, debris, dangly electricity cables and slowly-rising sea-water, girded with the slim hope that they may be able to make an exit through the hull, which is now many floors above them.

If this scenario doesn’t sound familiar, it should, because Poseidon is nothing more than a special effects-heavy remake of 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure, one of the grandaddies of all disaster movies.

However, CGI isn’t all the film is full of. This retread of the old yarn is crammed to the gunnels with outrageously stereotypical characters and cringe-inducing dialogue. So much so, in fact, that this surging bilge quickly overwhelms the pumps, and the movie is left to limp on with all the elegance of a giant turkey doing a one-winged backstroke across an ocean of liquid cheese.

After some scene-establishing camera aerobatics, stolen from Titanic, director Wolfgang Petersen goes table-to-table at the captain’s New Year’s Ball, introducing those passengers or crew who are going to get lucky, initially anyway, when the tsunami hits.

There’s Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell). As a former New York mayor and an ex-firefighter, he evokes twice over, with no subtlety whatsoever, the brave and defiant spirit of 9/11 Manhattan. He has moon-eyed daughter Jennifer and her boyfriend, Christian, in tow. Even unto the bitter end, Christian insists on respectfully calling Robert “sir” — “Yes, sir. No, sir. Three bags full of salt water, sir!”

There’s Richard Nelson (Richard “Jaws” Dreyfuss). Nelson’s a jilted, gay millionaire with a diamond ear stud and a broken heart, who is on the point of ending it all and going over the side when he meets the mighty wave coming the other way.

And there’s Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas), a jaded gambler who’s out for No 1 alone, until he starts to care about everybody but No. 1 and puts his life on the line again and again and again.

Although the new version is still freighted down with corn and cliche, it cuts back considerably on the weepy moments and goes more for anxiety, tension and terror. And, I suppose, in a watery setting such as this, Petersen, with his maritime CV — Das Boot and The Perfect Storm — is the right man for such a job.

His set-ups, in gradually flooding air ducts, ballast tanks and flame-licked lift shafts, are claustrophobic and nerve-shredding. Unfortunately, the movie also features lots of large, lavish five-star spaces which don’t seem to belong on a ship at all — this could be the Hong Kong Hilton stood on its head, with all the bath taps in all the en-suites left on.

As the group negotiated yet another five-storey atrium big enough to accommodate a middle-of-the-range cathedral, I was put in mind of Towering Inferno. In fact they could have called Poseidon, Towering Deluge, and no one would have noticed the difference.

VERDICT: Between a hull and a hard place.