Josh Hartnett’s big-budget busts and recent run of low-profile indies have somewhat obscured the fact he is a more than capable actor. 6 Below, the real-life tale of a troubled snowboarder trying to survive on a freezing mountain, gives him a chance to flex his muscles: it’s a one-man The Gray, or a sub-zero 127 Hours. And Hartnett gives it his all, spending the runtime shivering, fending off wolves and at one point getting butt-naked in the ice. He is not well-served, however, by the movie itself. His character is a bland cipher prone to quoting the Book of Romans at length (“For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I don’t want to do” — feeling sleepy yet?). Meanwhile, director Scott Waugh relies on a string of over-stylised, melodramatic flashbacks (the kind that better survival films such as All Is Lost dispensed with altogether) to tell us who he is and why we should root for his survival.
The fact that the story is based on an actual event, suffered by former Olympic hockey player Eric LeMarque, is a sizeable part of the problem. The hero’s battle with his demons (drugs, specifically meth) is handled coyly, as if the producers were worried about offending LeMarque, while the climax unleashes an avalanche of schmaltz. Even more problematically, the narrative drags even at a lean 93 minutes, with Hartnett wandering endlessly through snow without much action to perform, and the film cutting repeatedly to his mum (Mira Sorvino – in reality only ten years older than her co-star) as she tries to organise a rescue attempt.