Thor Heyerdahl couldn’t swim.
It’s late in the second half of “Kon-Tiki” before we learn that charming detail about the irrepressible Norwegian who built a huge raft using only medieval techniques to prove that it was possible to float, unguided, from Peru to Polynesia. The distance equates to that between Chicago and Moscow.
Heyerdahl (Pal Sverre Hagen) was a zoologist who, on a visit to French Polynesia, theorized that the islanders’ ancient legend about the sun god Kon-Tiki arriving from the east was true. Noting that a pineapple said to be indigenous to South America grew in Polynesia, he became convinced that Peruvians had settled the islands. Except the Peruvians had no boats — just balsa-wood rafts.
Together with five like-minded souls with more courage than sense, Heyerdahl set sail in 1947 from Peru upon a raft built only with materials that would have been available 1,500 years prior. He insisted, for instance, that the logs be lashed together with rope, not wire, leaving a substantial opportunity for the waves to simply rip apart the craft during the 4,500- mile voyage.
Also: sharks.
In the most thrilling sequence of this consistently rousing old-school adventure, Heyerdahl grabs a passing shark with his bare hands, thrusts a hook into it, drags it aboard and guts it with a knife. Now that’s what I call entertainment. I haven’t seen such crazed brutality since Lou Lumenick’s review of “Movie 43.”
“Kon-Tiki,” which shares a title with Heyerdahl’s own Oscar-winning 1950 documentary about the voyage, was shot simultaneously in both Norwegian and English (the former version earning an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film this year). It does takes some unfortunate liberties with facts. For instance: Heyerdahl did know how to swim, barely, though he didn’t learn until he was 22, a decade before the Kon-Tiki voyage.
Oh, well. Close enough. The film also has some of the cheesy touches that invariably prove as attractive as bloody chum to indie cinema’s Great White Harvey Weinstein, who is distributing “Kon-Tiki.”
But it’s a terrifically engaging throwback to the uplifting, irony-free, outdoorsy ’60s Disney yarns from which we kids would emerge begging our parents for a chance to go get shipwrecked or to trek across the Arctic or at least to follow through on that treehouse they promised. In reality, none of us could have survived 72 hours in the wild unless lifesaving quantities of television and Cheetos had been airlifted in.