Movie Review - Wrecked

Wrecked (2011)

Starring Adrien Brody

Directed by Michael Greenspan

***This film is currently streaming on Netflix***

Apparently, these days it's rather de rigueur if you're a male actor to want to be in a movie in which you're pretty much the sole person onscreen.  Taking a page from James Franco's 127 Hours and Ryan Reynolds' Buried, Oscar-winner Adrien Brody is all on his own in Wrecked, a flick that unfortunately pales in comparison to those two aforementioned 2010 films.

Adrien Brody is fine as a man who wakes up in a wrecked car in a ditch completely unaware of who he is or how he got in this predicament, but the film lacks the tension, suspense, and character development of 127 Hours and Buried.  I hate to put Wrecked into a compare/contrast-type scenario, but the fact of the matter is when you're creating a movie in which one person is going to be the only person the audience sees onscreen, there needs to be some type of connection or reason for us to care about the one-man show.  It's not that Brody doesn't try...we feel bad for him when he finds his leg trapped by the car wreckage or when the mountain lion tries to dine on him, but there's nothing in the film that allows us to latch onto his character and give a damn if he escapes.  

In the end it's a lack of dialog that kills the flick.  127 Hours and Buried both had unique ways of having their characters speak to the audience (the former through video diaries and the latter via cell phone communication).  Here, screenwriter Christopher Dodd (in his feature film debut) doesn't have a way for his main character to express his feelings, so instead we just here Brody grunting and screaming obscenities for 85 minutes and it ends up creating a gap between the audience and the character.

This flick got a super-limited release, and while it's not awful, it does drag after the novelty wears off about forty minutes in.  Instead of watching Wrecked, go watch those other two movies I mentioned multiple times above (both of which earned spots on my Best of 2010 post earlier this year).

The RyMickey Rating:  C-