by Curtis Edmonds -- blueduck@hsbr.org
Six Days, Seven Nights is one of those movies that give critics a bad name. Movie critics like originality. Critics -- even inexperienced ones like myself -- have seen so many, many movies that original movies stand out more in their minds. Movies that aren't original tend not to get reviewed very well.
Six Days, Seven Nights is not an original movie. It thumbs its nose at originality, it picks its teeth at originality, it uses its keys to scratch the paint job on originality's car. Six Days, Seven Nights happily, gleefully, rips off everything from Casablanca to The African Queen to The Fugitive (Harrison Ford breaks the all-time career record for jumping off impossible heights and surviving). That's just the part with Ford and Anne Heche stranded on a remote tropical island: the subplot involving the hapless David Schwimmer is lifted completely out of a Friends episode. The plot is so thin and transparent you could use it to wrap compact disks.
It would be fair to call Six Days, Seven Nights a shallow, unoriginal, uninspired, summer popcorn feature. But it would not be fair to call it a bad movie. Although the criticism aimed at Six Days, Seven Nights is well-earned it misses the point. This is a fairly good movie that manages to be entertaining and fun despite its obvious failings.
The best thing about Six Days, Seven Nights is Harrison Ford, who almost single-handedly redeems the movie from the depths of badness. Ford displays a dry, cynical wit reminiscent of his Indiana Jones performances. I've always felt that Ford is at his best playing a rogue and that his recent roles as Jack Ryan and as the President in Air Force One haven't really allowed him to display that side of his character. It's nice to get to see him play someone disreputable, and his role as a scruffy cargo pilot gives him the opportunity.
Anne Heche has equal billing with Ford and deserves it. The only thing I didn't like about her earlier effort in Wag the Dog was the short shrift that the movie gave its supporting characters. Heche was convincing as a ditzy press aide in that movie, and it's good to see her given more screen time. She knows what to do with it, too, holding her own with Ford in the comic banter that ensues when Ford's plane crashes on a spectacularly beautiful South Pacific island that looks to be the size of Michigan. Heche manages to be cute and funny even when her hair is completely wrecked -- a rare thing in Hollywood.
Much has been made about the relationship between Ford and Heche in Six Days, Seven Nights. What I liked most about the movie was that their conversation almost seemed improvised, as if the individual who wrote the script sort of left blank spaces for the actors to pencil in whatever lines they wanted to. The dialogue between Ford and Heche is the best part of the weak script, and it's nice to picture the actors making up dialogue as they go along.
Critics are people who look at movies and say that the glass is half empty, rather than half full. However, there's just enough in this particular glass to give a positive recommendation to Six Days, Seven Nights, a movie that manages to be fun and entertaining in spite of itself. Relax, kick back, and pass the popcorn.
Rating: B
-- Curtis Edmonds blueduck@hsbr.org
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