Skip past the odd lapses in logic and boil down the new “version” the of river-rafting-with-a-murderer plot titled “River Wild” to its basics.

It’s a thriller. Does it provide thrills? Does it serve up a surprise or two? Does it make you feel for its victims, root for the hero/heroine?

Yes it does, on all counts.

There’s no Meryl Streep or Kevin Bacon in this tale of terrord that have nothing to do with the rapids they’re running. But Leighton Meester and Adam Brody make decent substitutes in a lean, tight and violent tale of a family reunion rafting trip that goes ever-so-wrong.

Meester plays Dr. Joey Reese, motoring into remote Idaho to take a weekend trip down river with her burly rafting-guide brother, Gray (Taran Killam). A phone call with her fellow-physician and beau James lets us wonder if she’s fleeing the mad-rush of “commitment.”

No worries. They’ll “look for a house when you get back.” Just remember, “If you hear banjos, RUN!”

Cute. But it becomes pretty obvious not-too-far-downstream that not everything that wants you dead here is wet and filled with rocks, rapids and waterfalls, or playing the banjo.

Gray’s old pal and fellow guide Trevor (Brody) is on board the smaller-than-you’d-think inflatable. And he’s trying WAY too hard to strike-up whatever he wants to strike up with the woman he used to call “Jo Bean” back in the day.

Two pretty young Continentals (Olivia Swann and Eve Connolly) are the “paying” customers to Kootenai’s River Raft Tours latest ride down the Kootenai River. Nobody knows what they have in store for them, not even the instigator of their troubles and trials.

Gray, we learn during a campfire pass-the-bottle, is “sober.” Trevor, not everybody knows, is an ex-con. He and Gray have an unusually close relationship, one that will be tested when somebody gets hurt and no, it wasn’t an accident.

Director and co-writer Ben Katai — best-known for the TV series “Chosen,” “StartUp” and “The Expecting” — shows a nice feel for the river and the material and doesn’t get stylistically carried away with a story that demands streamlined speed to come off.

Most every twist in character behavior here is at least defensible — if not the most logical — given the dramatic circumstances.

Meester dresses down and toughens up, save for one scene that makes her almost eye-rollingly vocal. Brody oozes cornered-animal panic, which gives this picture its electric charge and momentum.

The neatest feat pulled off here is how this “River Wild” uses our connection with the heroine to empathize, as she does, with that first victim — someone gravely hurt simply for protecting herself, someone we see pitifully panicked, then drifting into seizure and shock.

It’s heartbreaking. That’s kind of a jaw-dropping thing for a simple, blunt-instrument thriller inspired by an earlier and somewhat similar tale.

No, it’s not a font of originality or endless blast of excitement. But “River Wild” does what its inspiration did and manages to move us as much as the Streep and Bacon Curtis Hanson film of 1994 did, and does it in a much shorter thriller.

Rating: PG-13, violence, bloodshed, profanity

Cast: Leighton Meester, Adam Brody, Olivia Swann, Taran Killam and Eve Connolly.

Credits: Directed by Ben Katai, scripted by Ben Ketai and Mike Le. A Universal production released on Netflix

Running time: 1:31