Audience-Alienating Premise: Instead of a speeding bus, the film takes place on a slow-sailing cruise ship as its main setting, which for many audiences completely missed the whole point. Tellingly, Keanu Reeves himself mentioned this as being the big reason why he chose to take a pass on the film.
Badass Decay: Annie is much less badass and more inconsequential to the plot than in the first film, not having much to do and is mostly played as a wisecracking sidekick and Damsel in Distress. It’s especially disappointing as Jack’s absence leaves her as the major carryover from the first film, which you’d think would entitle her to a bigger role.
Critical Dissonance: Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel are two of the ONLY three critics on Rotten Tomatoes who gave this film positive reviews (the third being Andrew Collins of Empire), which kept it from joining the 0% club. Ebert wrote that he liked the movie because it "embraces goofiness with an almost sensual pleasure". Ebert later said the review is sometimes used to demonstrate his "worthlessness" as a film critic. In 2013, he still stood by his opinion. He was the only critic who liked it at the time of his death (which gave it a 2%; Siskel and Collins' reviews were added later, bumping it to a whopping 4%).
Esoteric Happy Ending: Sure, Geiger's dead, and Alex and Annie are engaged... but half of a town just got smashed up when the liner ran aground, and if the Costa Concordia disaster 15 years later is anything to go by, it'll be a long, costly operation to remove it. And that's before you get to the fact that the island is probably now facing a major environmental disaster thanks to an oil tanker being blown up just off the shore. If not for the movie's pulling the No Endor Holocaust card and making it clear that Geiger was the only fatality in all of this, it would have been even more glaring.
Just Here for Godzilla: Some people watch this movie just to see Willem Dafoe acting creepy.
Memetic Mutation: Many of Geiger's exaggerated facial expressions have taken on a life of their own, especially his Slasher Smile.
The otherwise-impressive scene of the liner's crashing into the marina is undercut just a little by it cutting to Merced calling out "Two knots, almost stopped!" in a bizarrely triumphant tone — followed by a cut to the liner continuing to tear through the marina and obliterate everything in its path, clearly not slowing down at all.
A lot of the ADR dubbing falls under this, thanks to most of the main cast very audibly no longer caring by the time they got to that point, and either delivering their lines in the dullest tone imaginable, or hamming it up big-style.
Replacement Scrappy: Alex for Jack. Not that Jack had been one of the all-time great action heroes, mind you, but he was still a likable enough lead with some depth to his character, being surprisingly clever as well as tough, and a somewhat interesting backstory and was played by the immensely likable Keanu Reeves and had fantastic chemistry with Annie and was overall someone it was easy to root for, especially in contrast to Dennis Hopper as Payne. In contrast, Alex has virtually no backstory and is played with complete Dull Surprise by Jason Patric, thanks to his self-confessed unhappiness with the script and several other aspects of the production.
Signature Scene: The scene where the cruiser crashes into a marina and then tips over onto its side. Even the film's detractors generally concede the scene to be visually spectacular if nothing else.
So Bad, It's Good: It's unlikely to hold up as a dramatic classic like the original, but it features Willem Dafoe serving up Large Ham as the main villain and some cheesy acting from the ship's passengers.
Some of the shots of the boat, particularly during the tanker sideswipe and leading up to hitting land, are pretty obviously a CGI model. Turning into an obvious physical (albeit full-size) model when it starts crashing into the marina.
The plane Geiger flies off in is very clearly a low-rent CGI model when not in close-up.
that he liked the movie because it "embraces goofiness with an almost sensual pleasure". Ebert later said the review is sometimes used to demonstrate his "worthlessness" as a film critic. In 2013, he still stood by his opinion