The River Wild is a 1994 American thriller film directed by Curtis Hanson and starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Bacon, David Strathairn, John C. Reilly, and Joseph Mazzello. The story involves a family on a whitewater rafting trip who encounter two violent criminals in the wilderness.
Cast
Summary
A family, Gail (Streep), Tom (Strathairn), and their child Rourke (Mazzello), decide to take a holiday rafting down a river. As they are setting off they meet a couple of other rafters: Wade (Bacon) and Terry (Reilly), who appear to be two fun loving guys.
After a day's rafting the family make camp for the night and are joined by Wade and Terry who join with the family in celebrating Rourke's birthday. During the morning's rafting Wade reveals to Rourke that they have a gun with them; As they raft down the river the parents discuss an exit strategy that will allow them to leave the two guys behind and at lunch they attempt to leave on their raft and get away before the two guys realize.
Gail then realizes that an armed robbery she had heard about was actually carried out by the guys and their rafting trip is actually a way for them to get away. The family are forced to raft at gunpoint down the rest of the river before they all set up camp for the night. During the night Tom attempts to steal the gun off the sleeping Terry but is heard and has to run into the bushes and to the river. Wade gives chase and believes he has shot him when he hears a loud splash into the water.
It's revealed that Wade and Terry, in order to aide their escape, want to go on down the river to a set of rapids where in recent years a person died, the other left paralyzed and consequently rafting is no longer allowed. Wade and Terry force the rafters down through the rapids despite Gail's repeated attempts to flip the raft and so force the two guys out of the river.
Meanwhile a cop, who knows Gail is kayaking down the river bumps into the group but Wade holds the gun to Gail's back and pretends that everything is OK. Later in the movie he appears again but this time Wade shoots him and he falls dying into the river
Tom reappears (showing he survived the earlier fight) and manages to construct a scheme to flip the raft which ends up working. Gail and Rourke, who have been tied to the raft by Wade, remain in the raft and manage to get hold of the gun which has fallen to the floor whilst Tom is fighting Terry. The struggle ends when Gail throws the bag of money into the water and shoots Wade whose dead body floats off down river. The film ends with the family and Terry (having been arrested) being helicoptered out.
Awards
Trivia
- Many of the film's whitewater scenes were filmed on the Kootenai River In Montana. Additional scenes were filmed on the Rogue River, in Southern Oregon and the Middle Fork of the Flathead River.
- Meryl Streep did most of her own stunts.
- An exhausted Meryl Streep balked when director Curtis Hanson asked her to shoot one more scene before filming finished for the end of the day, however, she decided to attempt it. Swept off the raft, she was in real danger of drowning before she was rescued. Returning upriver, she told a pale and shaking Hanson that "in the future, when I say I can't do something, I think we should believe me." Hanson hastily agreed.[1]
- Benjamin Brat later co-starred with Kevin Bacon in the film the Woodsman (2004)
References
External links
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