If you like bland films full of blondes, you’ll love Kon-Tiki

Kon-Tiki is a dramatisation of Thor Heyerdahl’s 4,300-mile, 101-day journey across the Pacific by balsa-wood raft, which took place in 1947, and was a remarkable achievement, unlike this film, which so isn’t. True, it does what it says on the tin. There’s an ocean, and it’s traversed. There is jeopardy, most notably in the form of a big plasticky shark. But it’s played as such a straight-up-and-down, old-fashioned, formulaic adventure that it lacks any intimacy or feeling and almost can’t be bothered with its own characters. Consequently, it’s as bland as it is blond, and it is exceptionally blond. As styled by Th’Oreal, I guess you could even say.

To jog that old memory of yours, Thor was a Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer who was convinced the Polynesian islands were not initially populated by Asians, as conventionally thought, but by South Americans. To prove his theory, he built a raft as early South Americans might have built one, assembled a crew, and sailed from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands. Thereafter, he became an international sensation. His book, The Kon-Tiki Expedition, became a bestseller all over the world while his 1950 documentary about the expedition won an Oscar. It’s hard to know, actually, what the point of this film is, except this is Norway’s most expensive film ever, and maybe Norway hasn’t had a better story since? It’s even made the film twice: one is in Norwegian and the other is the one I saw, in which the actors are made to speak English. This minded me of a TV show from my childhood, Tales From Abroad, in which foreign actors were dubbed into English, but with an accent. That was distracting and distancing then, and this is distracting and distancing now.