Reusing or overiding elgg engine functions but with some changes.

If I have to use one of the elgg engine functions e.g elgg_view_river_items the definition of which is located in river2.php elgg engine file,but i want the function to behave little bit deferently so changing the core engine function will be sucide,is there any better way of like overiding this function in the plugin itself.

Thanks in advance