 If you're looking for a great edge-of-your-seat action adventure, The Riverwild has you covered. This thriller features Oscar winner Meryl Streep and footloose star Kevin Bacon. The movie came out in 1994. It's rated PG-13. I highly recommend it. Today, however, I'm going to be talking about Riverwild, the 2023 reboot that Netflix shout-out on its platform. Let's begin. According to IMDb, this is also called The Riverwild, but the title on the poster is Riverwild and that's what it says on Netflix. So what are we doing here? What's going on? This movie is also PG-13. It's an hour and a half long, and it has almost nothing to do with the original version, which I guess is kind of a pro because they're really two different movies altogether. The only thing they have in common is they are in fact going down a wild river. No, the movie doesn't have Hollywood royalty Meryl Streep involved, but it does make up for that by having Gossip Girl star Layton Meester. So, not the same at all. This is another Netflix movie in spirit only. The biggest positive I can say is it's an hour and a half long. It doesn't have an original score. Instead, it has two or three indie songs by probably the same band, maybe the brother of the director. I don't know who. I've never heard these songs before. It doesn't really matter. They're not very good. They're not interesting, and that's basically everything about this movie. And that doubly goes for the main star Joey, played by Layton Meester. She's just kind of a down on her luck, chip on her shoulder character, pretty quiet, pretty timid. By the end of the movie, she's gonna have to come out of her shell a little bit because she's up against the odds because she's found herself in quite a pickle. She and a couple of her gals go on a whitewater rafting adventure with two guides, one of which, a sketchy burnout named Trevor, fresh out of prison. He's definitely not going to be a problem in this film. It turns out he in fact is going to be a problem in this film, as pretty early on, he almost kills her best friend. And then the rest of the movie is really Trevor and the fam trying to get down the river into Canada so that he doesn't have to go behind bars again. Here's what you have to look out for. Some decent drone footage once in a while, some shaky cam footage occasionally, very mediocre premise. Very lackluster action scenes, an extended 20-minute scene where the characters sit around in the woods during the day, but the movie presents it at night, they just put the filter on it. I can't stand this look. It always looks bluish, boring, and artificial. Now I actually watched The River Wild with my family, with my two kids and wife a couple years back. They really dug the film. I remember liking it when I was younger. It still holds up nicely. If I were to show my kids this version, they would be checked out instantly. There's just nothing interesting happening. Later, there's some pretty egregious choices made by the characters that do stupid stuff, which normally would kind of trigger me, but I don't care at all about the film or the characters. So I was just sitting back, eyes glazed over, waiting for it to end. I paused it every 25 minutes or so just to see how close I was to that hour and a half mark. This is a watchable movie, but also why would you? There are so many better options, especially considering it has the same name as one that's better. And there's really no reason at all for this to be called River Wild, except for to piggyback off of the name River Wild. Not that it's a hot item right now, but you have people my age and older that do remember the old one. So they'll see this name show up. It might pique their interest and they might jump in. That's exactly what happened to me. So it works. The system works. I guess it's less insulting than calling it River Wild 2, but not much. I mentioned this movie's PG-13 towards the end of the film. There is a decent amount of blood in a scene, so I'm a little surprised they actually got away with the PG-13 rating. This movie also has a lot of shots of Layton Meester. I don't know if I'm saying that name right. A thousand apologies if I'm not. There's a lot of unattractive close-up shots of her just going like and crying and breathing hard and I don't want to see it. It's not pleasant to look at. They clearly didn't give two shits about this movie. They unceremoniously threw it out on the platform. I didn't see any talk about it coming out. It just showed up. So I don't feel like I need to talk any more about this movie. You don't need to watch it. If you did for some reason, let me know in the comments where you're like, oh my god, a new River Wild finally. It's what everybody's been wanting. It was amazing. Adam, you're completely wrong on this. It really elevated the material from the original and took it in a far more interesting way. Let me know. Please like the video if you had a good time. Subscribe for more movie reviews. Lately I've been trying to play ball and review more streaming things, mostly on Netflix. That seems to still be the biggest, most popular app that people are watching garbage on. So I'm doing my best to get those out as well. I'd love to have you stick around and hopefully I'll see you next time.