Wrecked

Wrecked

Directed by Michael Greenspan

A completely forgettable Adrien Brody vehicle, that's just good enough to keep you watching, but not enough to make the time spent worthwhile.

Brody delivers a typical self-pitying performance, as a man so unrelatable, boring and one-dimensional, that he could very well be a species of his own. This movie would have probably been worth the time had his performance been stronger, but it's not even entirely his fault. Due to the incredibly weak script, he was given very little material, which mostly consisted of groaning, moaning, grunting, etc.

For the first 20 minutes we are subjected to some of the least important scenes in history (the dinosaurs in The Tree Of Life are more relevant). Brody wakes up to find himself trapped in the passenger seat of a crashed car in the middle of the woods. We are supposed to believe that this car got here by rocketing off of a nearby cliff, but there seem to be no signs of such a plummet -- aside from, obviously, the wrecked car. It's in these first 20 minutes that the tone of the rest of the movie is set. Thrust into an overly-familiar situation (if you've ever seen last year's Buried or 127 Hours, you know the score), Brody's character sits around whining, until eventually he manages to get out of the car. Sadly, the movie doesn't improve from here.

Much like faux-documentaries, movies about men trapped in confined spaces are incredibly restricted in their ability to bring anything new to the table, causing them to quickly become uninteresting and redundant. 127 Hours explored the depths of humanity; Buried, a commentary on bureaucracy and governmental hypocrisy. Wrecked doesn't have any sort of social/political statement, new approach, or, quite frankly, even a point. In the aforementioned movies, we are given a satisfying reason as to why they are in the situation they are in, but in Wrecked they don't tell us until the last 30 seconds, which epitomize the term "anti-climax". If you're hoping for an impactful conclusion, don't bother finishing this movie.

Now, before I lead you to believe that the entire movie is just about a man trapped in a car, I would like to repeat that this is only over the course of the first 20-30 minutes -- which are tedious to say the least. The remaining hour largely consists of Brody crawling around in circles, making friends with a dog, inexplicably hallucinating about people (who are almost entirely unrelated to the story), and trying to avoid being eaten by a very lazy mountain lion. Now, despite being the only thing that we're shown, this section of the story isn't the driving force behind this movie: The real story is in how he got there -- which, by the way, is nothing to be excited about. For a movie about bank robbers, and a car with a trunk-load of money flying off of a cliff, the ending is about as uninteresting as you could possibly expect.

Riddled with hallucinations which serve little-to-no purpose whatsoever, Brody's "journey" is event-less, emotionally uninvolving, and provides no entertainment. Every key plot detail is revealed within the first 30 minutes (and the last 30 seconds), making the entire hour in-between superfluous. Instead of taking this empty space to develop Brody's character further, add weight to his plight, or even conjuring up additional plot-lines to keep things interesting, Wrecked instead does nothing with it. There were large portions where I could have fallen asleep, woken back up and not missed a single thing -- in fact, I think I might have on a few occasions. If so, I know I didn't miss anything.

An unlikable character with no personality stuck in an almost entirely unrelatable predicament doesn't make for great drama: Especially not when the mystery that fuels the movie is every bit as dull and unsatisfying as the pathetic lead performance. Don't waste your time.