"Simply ghastly!" is the perfect description for this horror show, which sank like the real ship from the gate & only plunged down more after that. Bruce Davison must've been broke & begging for work to take on his role in this start-to-finish dreck. I became wide-eyed & openmouthed with shock at the 1st instance of its subbasement-level quality - a rear starboard shot of an all-too-obvious cartoon boat sailing away - & just rubbernecked the rest. After 1 closeup of the cursed name on the starboard bow gunwale - which looked like a repro of the actual, with "II" pasted on in a different font - this silly ship displayed no such thing, even on the stern as it disappeared into the depths. All know she had "TITANIC / LIVERPOOL" on her broad butt - that 25-year-old overblown Vastly Overrated snooze-a-rama with about just 75 minutes of chair-arm-gripping thrills (the crash & sinking sequence) demonstrates that clearly. Interestingly though, while I am not of the opinion "it's so bad it's good," there was 1 absorbing thing about it that lasted, owing to potential gaps covered by dialogue, machinery & various crashings, around 17 minutes From Beginning To End. This is when Amy & Hayden are struggling to escape the diving facility & he sacrifices himself to save her. The accompanying music is actually KA-level (kickass) good, well-matched to the action - though having had bushels of corn dumped on the audience hitherto, jerks no tears in the process - which if that kind of care & attention to detail had been used throughout, this would not have been such a 1-star disappointment. Dick Van Dyke's lookalike grandbaby "may be limited in many respects" as a director, but here he showed more than a hint of acting promise to do the old boy proud. "Notice how" he played dead so effectively - not a single giveaway eye movement even as the girl shook his head like a rat terrier with its prize. "Very well done," though this was in only a fraction of the total running time. We are left just with a sigh of What Could've Been between that 1 scene & how Willard - oops, Bruce Davison - rose to this sinking occasion with his performance (not his fault somebody tossed him a "USS Titanic II" inaccuracy to tell), & the faint hope that someday not too far in the uncertain future might come our way a (way) more effective retelling of the Titanic than both this & Cameron's sails-like-a-stone overpraised overhyped production. She & we both deserve it.
Review of Titanic II
