| Six Days, Seven Nights | |
| Director: | Ivan Reitman |
| Cinematography: | Michael Chapman |
| Distributor: | Buena Vista Pictures Distribution |
| Runtime: | 102 minutes |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Budget: | $65–70 million[1] |
| Gross: | $164.8 million |
Six Days, Seven Nights is a 1998 American action-adventure comedy film directed by Ivan Reitman, produced by Reitman and Roger Birnbaum, and starring Harrison Ford and Anne Heche. The screenplay was written by Michael Browning. It was filmed on location in Kauai, and released on June 12, 1998. The film received overall mixed reviews, with praise directed towards Ford's and Heche's performances and chemistry, but criticism directed towards the screenplay's predictability. The film was a box-office success, grossing $164.8 million worldwide.
Robin Monroe, a New York fashion magazine editor, and her boyfriend Frank, are spending a week-long vacation in Makatea, an island in the South Pacific. The final leg of their journey to Makatea is piloted by middle-aged American Quinn Harris. Quinn's girlfriend Angelica, accompanies them. On their first night on the island, Frank proposes to Robin. Later, a drunken Quinn, failing to recognize Robin, unsuccessfully hits on her.
The next morning, Robin's boss Marjorie calls and wants her to briefly interrupt her vacation to supervise a fashion shoot in Tahiti. Robin hires Quinn to fly her there. While en route, a sudden thunderstorm forces Quinn to turn back to Makatea. Lightning strikes the plane, damaging the transmitter and radio. Quinn is forced to land on a deserted island but the plane hits a large rock that damages the landing gear. The next day, Frank and Angelica join an aerial search party for their missing partners.
Believing the island has a signal beacon, Quinn and Robin climb a high hill to disable it and bring a repair crew, only to discover this is a different island. They spot a yacht off the coast and row out in Frank's life raft. Using binoculars, Quinn witnesses a man being killed and thrown overboard and realizes that a second boat there belongs to pirates. The pirates see them and pursue the duo back to the island. After briefly getting captured, Quinn and Robin narrowly escape by jumping off a cliff into the ocean, then hide in the jungle. They discover a crashed World War II Japanese floatplane. Meanwhile, Quinn and Robin grow romantically attracted.
Back in Makatea, after a few days of unsuccessful searching, a depressed Frank, believing Robin is dead, gets drunk and sleeps with Angelica after she seduces him. Soon after, the search is ended and a beachside memorial service is planned for Quinn and Robin.
Meanwhile, Quinn and Robin salvage the floatplane's pontoons and modify Quinn's plane to leave the island. As they are about to take off, the pirates reappear and fire shells onto the beach, injuring Quinn. The duo are able to take off and fly over the pirates, who, shooting directly up into the air, accidentally destroy their boat when the shell lands on them. Quinn quickly instructs Robin on how to land the plane before passing out due to his injury, leaving Robin to fly it herself. Arriving at Makatea, she crash lands the plane close to the beach where the memorial service is in progress. Frank is ecstatic that Robin is alive, but secretly despises himself for sleeping with Angelica. Robin visits Quinn in the hospital and confesses her feelings for him, but he says their lives are too different and they part ways.
As Robin and Frank are about to fly back to New York, Frank confesses he slept with Angelica; Robin then reveals she feels something for Quinn. Both realize they are not in love, and Robin returns Frank's engagement ring.
Having a change of heart, Quinn rushes to the airport to find Robin, but is apparently too late as the New York-bound plane is taking off. Quinn then encounters Robin, who deboarded the plane and is surprised to see him. Quinn confesses his feelings for her, and they are happily reunited.
The film was acquired by Caravan Pictures for Disney's Hollywood Pictures as a vehicle for Julia Roberts.[2] Following Roberts' departure from the film, Anne Heche was cast.[3]
The film features stunt work with aircraft. The effects were produced without CGI assistance. The crash scene of the de Havilland Beaver was performed with a Huey helicopter suspending the unmanned aircraft with a 200-foot cable with the engine running.[4]
Harrison Ford is a certified pilot and did his own flying in the film, after fulfilling the insurance company's training requirements.[5]
On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, Six Days, Seven Nights holds an approval rating of 38% based on 42 reviews, with an average rating of 5.4/10. The site's critics consensus states: "A generally enjoyable, if completely forgettable piece of Hollywood fluff."[6] At Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 51 out of 100, based on 23 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[7] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[8]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 2-stars-out-of-4. He wrote highly of the films leads, saying Ford had "an easy appeal" and Heche exhibited "unforced charm", yet the film overall "seems cobbled together out of spare parts".[9] Leonard Maltin called the film "an entertaining romantic comedy", and gave it three out of four stars, while observing "an obvious setup is played out with great verve by the stars."[10]
Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat of Spirituality & Practice called the film a "humorous romantic comedy" and also praised the leads: "Harrison Ford is perfectly cast as the kind of man anyone would want around in a jeopardy situation. Anne Heche displays plenty of spunk and sparkle as a woman whose life is altered by her adventures as a castaway."[11]
Six Days, Seven Nights grossed $74.3 million in the United States and Canada, and $90.5 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $164.8 million.
In its opening weekend the film made $16.5 million and finished in second, then made $10.7 million and $7.7 million the following two weekends.[1] [12]