Netflix’s spate of serious documentaries in 2025 haven’t provided much opportunity for humour, which makes Trainwreck: Poop Cruise something of a relief. You can laugh at this one. It isn’t about unsuspecting teenagers getting crushed to death at a concert, or an elected official smoking crack with gun runners. Nobody died aboard the Carnival Triumph, a semi-luxurious party cruise liner that departed Galveston, Texas, for a four-day voyage to Cozumel, Mexico, in February 2013. But everyone did have a uniquely terrible time, which director James Ross has realized in hindsight is pretty funny.
And it’s obvious from the very beginning that this is being played for laughs. Sure, it wasn’t funny to be on board after a fire in the aft engine room on the second day of the trip killed all the power. If this happened anywhere, it’d probably be annoying. On a ship, though, it’s a nightmare, since it’s that power controlling the vessel’s propulsion, the air conditioning, the refrigeration, and the sanitation. The weather in the Gulf of Mexico isn’t known for being cool, so several days spent idling in the water while the perishables rot, the passengers broil, and the toilets overflow isn’t the kind of experience you expect on a cruise.
Yet, here we are. This is the basic narrative thrust of Trainwreck: Poop Cruise, which becomes progressively funnier over a period of five days as conditions aboard the ship worsen and each proposed solution creates new problems. One of these solutions is opening the bar for free, which would be a bad idea on a regular cruise, let alone one filled with sewage. Another is a tug boat rescue intended to drag the Triumph to Mobile, Alabama, which takes several days and hits bad weather, tipping the boat this way and that – again, not exactly ideal on a vessel full of raw sewage.
The viewpoints of various hand-picked passengers, crew, and associated professionals – news anchors and maritime lawyers, for instance – are very smartly chosen. The only feasible emotional heft comes from a father and his daughter; everyone else is chosen because their stories are funny. A dude trying to impress his new father-in-law in the midst of an escalating crisis, a chef who can’t stop laughing at some of the worst stuff that happened, and a trio of women on a bachelorette party are particular highlights.
Not to minimise all this, obviously. The journey was truly grim and doubtlessly took a psychological toll on many of the passengers, all of whom were cut off from the outside world and left to stew in a rather fetid, oppressive cocktail. It’s really no surprise that once snippets of the story managed to get out, it became international trending news, partly because it was so disgusting, partly because it was terrifying, and partly because it seemed impossible that such a thing could happen to paying customers.
This forms its own very minor subplot in Poop Cruise, but it’s underdeveloped. There’s some suggestion that Carnival-owned ships had a history of substandard maintenance protocols and that the fire was probably avoidable. They did a good job of apologising, offering full refunds and free future cruises, and investing substantial amounts into upgrades. The company is still going strong, and the Triumph itself is still on the water, albeit under a different name. And it’s pretty inarguable that the staff aboard the Triumph comported themselves admirably, continuing to put the passengers first, even if it meant letting them get extremely drunk and urinate off the top deck. Which sounds like a pretty good holiday, if it weren’t for all the other awful stuff.
But this isn’t a cautionary tale like the previous Trainwreck instalments have been. Stuff like this doesn’t typically happen aboard cruise ships, and doesn’t seem likely to happen again, at least not on a Carnival-owned vessel, so there’s a feeling of being free to poke fun at it all that makes Poop Cruise a really good time. For the viewer, at least. But even the passengers can have a laugh about it these days.