Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Gail and Tom Hartman are struggling to stay together and decide to take a white-water rafting holiday adventure in Montana for their son Roarke's 10th birthday, only to meet up with a pair of mysterious men whose desperation grows, turning their vacation into a nightmare.
The River Wild is a competent mid-90s thriller that delivers solid tension through its white-water rafting setting. The plot blends a marriage-in-crisis drama with a hostage thriller in a functional but fairly formulaic way — the family-vacation-gone-wrong premise is well-executed but not particularly fresh. Meryl Streep brings considerable credibility and physicality to her role, elevating the material above its genre trappings, while Kevin Bacon makes for an effectively menacing villain; the supporting cast is serviceable. Cinematography captures the genuine danger and beauty of the rapids with some impressive location work, though it rarely transcends its action-thriller visual language. Novelty is limited — the film is essentially a hostage thriller transplanted to a river, and while the setting adds excitement, the formula is familiar. The ending resolves tensions competently within genre expectations without surprising or transcending them.