What, no tidal wave? Hang on

The TV movie remake of “The Poseidon Adventure,” a Hallmark Entertainment affair airing on NBC Sunday night, tries to riff on the original Irwin Allen disaster epic down to the retro chic of its cast. It’s a cavalcade of stars that starts promisingly at Steve Guttenberg, Rutger Hauer, Bryan Brown and C. Thomas Howell but runs out of steam at the actresses, failing to assemble a similar gaggle of where-have-they-beens.

Oh, those Hollywood double standards. It’s a key omission that prevents this “Poseidon Adventure” from being a more fun piece of recycled mash. Even the director, John Putch, has roots in our collective unconscious TV vault (he was the fragile teenager Bob, who had a crush on Valerie Bertinelli in the 1970s sitcom “One Day at a Time”).

In this sweeping context, NBC’s “Poseidon” is a “Love Boat” episode gone bad in the age of the war on terrorism. This time around a bunch of Islamic terrorists play the tidal wave, blowing a hole in the ship; in the prelude there’s even a fussy Chechen mastermind who, in a brief flicker of hope, I thought might be Charles Nelson Reilly.

An exercise like this does get you to wonder -- where is this generation’s George Kennedy, its Marjoe Gortner, its Shelley Winters? That certain kind of work-is-work-is-work veteran, old enough to have come up when there was still a studio system for actors -- they added a certain half-serious, half-comical gravitas to the disaster flicks of the 1970s, of which Allen was its leading purveyor with “Airport,” “The Poseidon Adventure,” “The Towering Inferno” and “Earthquake.”

It’s what Dennis Hopper’s doing on NBC’s Pentagon-set “E-Ring,” or even Donald Sutherland’s speaker of the House on “Commander in Chief.”

Given that it has little in the way of glittering special effects, the film, shot in South Africa, might have tried a homage in this way of casting. Nor does an act of terrorism bring more tension to the capsizing of the ship than a big wave would have. In fact, it only cheapens the whole thing, placing it squarely in the province of hack villainy.

A blockbuster “Poseidon” remake, directed by Wolfgang Petersen (“Das Boot,” “The Perfect Storm”) and reportedly starring, among others, Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfuss, is due in theaters next year. In that one, the tidal wave is still the tidal wave. Of course it is. The point of remaking an Allen disaster film, one would assume, is to showcase advances in special effects while poaching a previous era’s seminal movie event.

The TV movie, by contrast, is a drive-by disaster-flick sweeps staple, with cameo appearances from computer-generated imagery. The teleplay, which Bryce Zabel adapted from Paul Gallico’s novel, has the ship bound from Cape Town, South Africa, to Sydney, Australia, our survivors an egalitarian band of cliches, some of them updated to reflect recent pop culture trends and airborne anxieties. So Borgnine’s New York City cop Rogo is now Rogo the sea marshal working for the Department of Homeland Security (Adam Baldwin); Brown is the Australian producer of a show called “World’s Greatest Pop Stars” who is in love with third place; and Guttenberg is a guilt-ridden husband and father of two in a counseled-out marriage whose young son filters life through his hand-held Camcorder while Dad beds the ship’s masseuse (Nathalie Boltt).

The list goes on -- Hauer is a somnambulant version of Gene Hackman’s jaded priest character; Howell is the ship’s doctor; Peter Weller pops up as the ship’s captain, the Leslie Nielson part; and the venerable British actress Sylvia Syms gets the Winters role, telling the terrorist: “I want to know what terrible things happened to you that you should be so full of hate.”

The death-defying action pauses for interludes like that. “ER’s” Alex Kingston, not on board the ship, is a British intelligence agent brought onto a mission-control set to stare worriedly at monitors.

But nobody’s fully on board here. The better remakes of iconic movies or TV (“The Brady Bunch Movie,” say) put a new spin on what is frozen in time, accentuate the campiness or just make everything look better and seem more thrilling. “The Poseidon Adventure” -- as a TV movie remake of a movie that is itself being remade as a movie -- does neither. It’s more faithful to the kind of TV movie that now feels dated.

But then, it’s of a piece with what’s happening in the culture now. We seem to be in a golden age for recycling, with technology leading the way. TV shows now live on via DVD. Meanwhile, it was announced this week, Time Warner Inc. and America Online will make vintage TV available on your computer. Practically speaking, it means you can watch old episodes of “Falcon Crest,” “Welcome Back, Kotter” and more than 100 other shows from the Time Warner Library. You could ask after the social implications of all this available content, all the time, but that ship has sailed.

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‘The Poseidon Adventure’

Where: NBC

When: 8 to 11 p.m. Sunday

Ratings: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

Rutger Hauer...Bishop Schmidt

Steve Guttenberg...Richard Clarke

Alexa Hamilton...Rachel Clarke

C. Thomas Howell...Dr. Robert Ballard

Adam Baldwin...Mike Rogo

Executive producers Robert Halmi Jr. and Larry Levinson. Director John Putch. Teleplay Bryce Zabel.