Wrecked and Meandering Characters: A Movie Review

Director: Michael Greenspan.

Writer: Christopher Dodd.

Wrecked is a film that had a one weekend premiere in April. Now, the film has moved onto DVD and Blu-Ray (Aug. 30th), making this, basically, a straight-to-DVD release. The film stars Adrien Brody, alone and in the wilderness. Meanwhile, a search party is looking for his whereabouts, as "the man (Brody)" begins to recover from a case of amnesia. Sparse in script, Wrecked is more of an experiment than anything else. Unfortunately this experiment was a failure, due to the film's pacing issues and lack of direction, or focus.

The plot can be broken down into a few words or plot elements: car crash, cougar, and rescue. That is the heart of the film, which drags itself out for far too long. To expand, the man awakens in a wrecked car to find himself trapped in his spot. He cannot wiggle his knee out from under the dashboard. Meanwhile, a hungry cougar has entered the picture, who then begins to feast on his deceased car mates. Cue amnesia, an exit from the car and almost an hour of "the man" hobbling through the woods and you have the story pretty well summed up.

The lack of action moves this review into the second point; this film is tedious! Initially, the film offers feelings of claustrophobia as Greenspan keeps almost all of the shots in the interior of the car and sometimes from the point of view of the trapped main character. There is a sense of dread as "the man" tries to capture water. However, events shift when "the man" is able to free himself. Strangely this character does not follow the car's path of destruction up a hillside to a road in favour of a trip down a fast flowing river and a few too many minutes spent in a cave or two. Watching a character crawl around a forest is not entertaining to this reviewer, unless the plot is being moved forward in some sense. Instead the film goes in circles, as noticed by Clark Douglas of DVD Verdict "nor does he [Greenspan] excel at bringing any suspense to the proceedings."

The focus on the film is therefore not on the entertainment factor, but rather on the psychological. Questions that might pop into a viewers head while watching this film might be how much can this man take, what is the purpose of the character's hallucinations, what is real or fiction and when will this film be over? Director Michael Greenspan and writer Christopher Dodd seem to be placing some of their own psychology into the script. Most of the imaginary characters e.g. a dog and a possible bank teller serve almost no known purpose outside of guilt: "they are [visions], in fact, manifestations of deep-seated guilt" (Slant). Also, some of the inner world of "the man" is explored through flashbacks, but this gets tiresome at the midway point of the film.

Undoubtedly, this film will be compared to Danny Boyle's 127 Hours or Rodrigo Cortes' Buried and indeed, it already has. These two films have a whole lot more tension, while allowing the viewer to identify with the main character. Here, because of the protagonist's amnesia, there is almost no direct way to understand this character or his thought processes. A name on a credit card here and a radio broadcast there are not enough to bring most viewer's into to the character's precarious situation.

Wrecked is not a complete disaster, but the film fails by not including much in the way of tension. The film has no direction, very little insight into the character's inner world and only a few snippets of action, or excitement through dreams. These film elements are not enough to recommend the film, especially when the monotony, slow pacing and lack of a solid script drag the film down. The story could have easily been wrapped up in the first half of the film and the extension is a detriment to viewers.

Writing/plot/story: 5 (not much of a story, overly simple, lack of characters, no tension).
Characters/believably: 7 (no problems with Brody's acting, supposedly Brody slept out in the British Columbia woods in preparation for this role).
Cohesion/conclusion/pacing: 5.5 (big problems here).

Overall: 5.8 out of 10 (skip this title).

Another review of this title at DVD Verdict (Douglas):

Wrecked Reviewed at DVD Verdict

A second external review at Slant Magazine (Nick Schager):

Wrecked Reviewed at Slant

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