Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale

>> Harrison Ford and Anne Heche grace the so-so comedy Six Days, Seven Nights

by MATTHEW HAYS

What the summer really needed is a good fish-out-of-water, stranded-on-a-desert-isle kind of movie. I'm not kidding. They're usually a lot of fun, and even if the stories have great potential to end up hackneyed, summer movies tend to demand predictability.

Here it is, and it's got star power: Harrison Ford, playing a lovelorn pilot for hire with a tendency to drink, is matched with Anne Heche, who plays an overworked Manhattan magazine editor who's off for a tropical vacation with her boyfriend (David Schwimmer, basically recreating his character from Friends).

Screenwriter Michael Browning steals heavily from Lina Wertmuller's 1975 classic Swept Away--pointing up Heche and Ford's class differences--as well as virtually every romantic mismatch comedy ever made. Heche and Schwimmer decide to take a week to get away from their bustling lives in the city (director Ivan Reitman portrays urbanites just as utterly empty and shallow as Robert Redford did in The Horse Whisperer). Schwimmer proposes to Heche, who appears to accept, without actually saying the word 'yes.' Then her overbearing boss phones, and Heche must make it part-way back to civilization for a mere 15 hours for a crucial assignment. Ford's her ticket out, and before anyone can say "Robinson Crusoe" their plane has crashed and they're stuck on a beautiful island that has somehow remained entirely uninhabited.

The film's main asset is clearly its lead team. Though primarily cast as virtuous, heroic leading men, Ford has a canny comic talent, generating many laughs in Six Days. As the pilot, he seems like an aging Han Solo, if that pilot had never taken up with Princess Leia and had traded in the Millennium Falcon for a four-seat sea plane. Heche, an actor with far less experience, holds her own (the speculation in the gay press has been focusing on how a lesbian leading woman will play to middle America; trouble with this speculation is, Heche has made it clear in interviews that though she's in a relationship with a woman, she sees herself as bisexual.)

Six Days, Seven Nights becomes stranded by the final third. Some pirates threaten Ford and Heche's lives, and necessity soon mothers invention; the film then adopts a strain of realism only ever seen on episodes of Gilligan's Island, as the two use bamboo and bits of another plane wreck to repair their plane.

I suppose a film like this can't really be faulted for tying everything up a bit too neatly. What do you want, a Crying Game conclusion? Erotic and romantic gestures are exchanged, and Heche and Ford learn they're not so different after all (though there's no mention of their considerable age difference). Six Days, Seven Nights is about what you'd expect: relatively innocuous, charming enough, sprinkled with a few good one-liners--about six parts good, seven parts mediocre.

Six Days, Seven Nights opens Friday, June 12