River Wild (2023) Movie Review
Nathan Swank
July 31st, 2023
I absolutely love 1994’s THE RIVER WILD starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Bacon, David Strathairn, and John C. Reilly. So it seems a bit frustrating that a remake of a nearly 30 year-old popular film with some serious star power actors would get remade with, and no offense to the talented actors in the film, but B list movie stars. However, RIVER WILD 2023 is surprisingly… not bad.
A tour guide expert brother and doctor sister, played by Taran Killam and Leighton Meester along with an old friend and ex-con played by Adam Brody set off on a white water adventure. Joining them are a couple of best friends played by Olivia Swann and Eve Connolly as paying customers on this tour guided fun. But dangers come from more than just the river and things don’t go quite as planned in the RIVER WILD.
The 2023 version changes up the story quite a bit in the sense of altering who the characters are and what their roles are and relationships with one another. Written by director Ben Ketai and Mike Nguyen Le and adapted from the original film, RIVER WILD is very formulaic, but thankfully resists the plugged in plot generated from AI. The characters and outcome changes are just passable, but understandably not quite theatrical worthy. There is tension and credible performances in a pretty fantastic location that make for a reasonably easy fun watch from home type of movie.
White water rafting at the center of a film is always a good idea. You get beautiful and exciting scenery through forest and rivers with the occasional giant rock, cave, waterfall to drive up the excitement. I’m sure the difficulty of shooting on location spots like that is not easy and perhaps why more films don’t center around that specific terrain.
Some of the characters make some bad decisions and one specific scene involving a bystander feels like they should have reworked, rewritten, reedited, and reperformed. It did not work. But the main five in the film give strong performances even if their predecessor was Meryl Streep. I’ve always been a fan of Taran Killam since SNL and I’m happy to see him pop on screen when I can.
If you’ve never seen the original THE RIVER WILD, definitely do that. But RIVER WILD 2023 is different enough from the original and achieves some thrills and light entertainment. You could definitely do worse when trying to decide what to watch on Netflix.
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