Been There, Seen That

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The big news first: Anne Heche is a completely persuasive object for Harrison Ford's (or any other male heterosexual's) attentions. Actually, this is no news at all--not to anyone who has seen her work in movies as various as Donnie Brasco, Wag the Dog and Volcano. In them Heche established the fact that she's good in crises, vulnerable yet capable, not someone the ravening male ego can walk all over, yet supportive when the crunch comes.

These qualities were obviously not lost on director Ivan Reitman when he cast her--well before the issue of her personal romantic preferences raised its irrelevant head--in Six Days, Seven Nights. For this is a castaway comedy with a stronger-than-usual admixture of action sequences thrown in to please her co-star's boyish fans. His Quinn is a charter pilot and social dropout. Her Robin is a nervous small-plane passenger and magazine editor. And they are forced to survive on a tropical island when their plane is forced down by a storm.

You know the drill: uggy fauna must be confronted, nasty flora must be cut through. And then there's the not entirely plausible pirate attack to be beaten off. All this, naturally, provides the occasion first for bickering, then for dawning mutual respect, finally for bonding. All in all, one cannot say that originality is screenwriter Michael Browning's strong suit. You always feel that you're ahead of this movie's curve.

This puts a burden on the stars, for the movie has to run on their charm. Ford's cranky masculinity is, of course, a known quantity, although it's always fun to watch him simmer, snort and eventually soften. Snub-nosed, wide-eyed and high-spirited, Heche has an equally conventional transition to make, from Xanex-popping, would-be sophisticate with minimal survival skills to a woman who can bop a bad guy with a fallen tree branch and help repair the airplane for a getaway. She is also encumbered with a tiresome fiance (David Schwimmer), who takes up a lot of preaccident screen time and whose only function is to give her pause when Quinn shows his true, irresistibly cuddlesome colors.

But it's all so predictable. And you begin to wonder, as you so often do at the movies these days, why did they bother? And more to the point, why should we bother?

--By Richard Schickel