TV REVIEWS : The Real-Life ‘Desperate Journey’ Becomes Long Haul

In real life, Allison Wilcox’s 10-day ordeal at sea in a life raft was terrifying, grueling and a miracle of survival. Its inevitable TV incarnation, however, provides more tedium than terror.

In “Desperate Journey: The Allison Wilcox Story” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on ABC, Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42), Wilcox (“thirtysomething’s” Mel Harris) is a five-months pregnant leukemia survivor who signs on as a deck hand to deliver a sailboat from South Carolina to Rhode Island. When she and fellow crew members Marc (Dana Ashbrook) and Eddie (John Schneider) are capsized by Hurricane Bob, they spend the next 10 days drifting in the middle of the Atlantic with almost no food and no fresh water.

Directed by Dan Lerner, credibility is lost from the start when Marc and Eddie are portrayed as such obvious, arrogant jerks that you can’t believe anyone, much less a pregnant woman alone, would set sail with them.

When Marc, a Captain Queeg type, orders that they outrun the lashing hurricane rather than seek safe harbor, it’s difficult to understand why he’s not overruled. Once on the raft, the two men engage in constant rancorous confrontations; Allison is peacemaker and mommy.

The characters in Jonathan Rintels’ script are so unlikable--even Harris’ fine effort can’t make her role sympathetic--and the dialogue so uncompelling, that staying with the film for two hours becomes the real ordeal.