Wrecked

Right. First of all I need to express my disappointment. I was really looking forward to seeing this movie for quite some time now. Ever since I saw the trailer, from which it looked really attractive. It looked like it was going to be an interesting, psychedelic story, with twists and tension. ESPECIALLY due to the fact that ADRIEN BRODY is there! Because after seeing ''The Jacket'', in which Adrien Brody also starred, I was left stunned. So you can imagine the gripping excitement that came to me about half a year ago before the release of ''Wrecked'' when I found out that a movie like this would come out! But everyone, who has high hopes for this film because of the same, or at least a similar reason, can give up right now. This movie will definitely NOT satisfy, let alone EXCEEED, your expectations, because...well...It is boring. Simple as that. The plot itself is really plain. So plain, that it would actually be difficult to spoil anything, since there is almost nothing to spoil. The trailer alone can give out practically everything. And the film is really TOO LONG. And that makes this dull plot even MORE painfully tiresome. If they would have reduced the whole movie to about 30 minutes, I am sure it would have turned out to an interesting short, but now, harshly speaking, it looks like a bad version of ''127 hours''. This movie practically tells nothing new or interesting to the audience. But there is one reason to not completely condemn this title. Adrien Brody. Even thought, the story is disappointing, I cannot complain in any way about the amazing performance by Adrien Brody. Flawless acting. But that's it. Nothing more essentially positive that I can think of that was good in this movie... The make-up on Adrien Brody maybe?... If you have a significantly huge amount of unbendable patience within you, you may actually get lucky and think it was an OK movie. Otherwise, which is a lot more likely, you WILL not be impressed. At all.

This is a very uncomfortable film. Now I don't mean it is bad. I mean this is the type of film you can feel and you start to feel what the main character is going through. The whole movie is based around one main character played by Adrien Brody. He did an excellent job. The movie starts with him waking up in a car that had fallen off a small cliff. He is alive, but the people around him are dead. Through the whole film you are trying to piece together what happened. By the end you figure it out, but there are some things they leave untouched on purpose. Let the viewers mind come up with its own conclusions. This movie takes on a different type of scary. Like a real life scary. I remember a few scenes that when they happened, I couldn't help but shake my head and think much that would really suck in real life. The writers of the film made a good story and the director did a good job with little budget they probably had. This was a very nice suspenseful film.

This is going to be a very short review because, frankly, there isn't much to say about Wrecked. The first 20 to 30 minutes of the film consists of Adrien Brody trapped in a wrecked car deep in the forest… For the remaining 65 minutes, we get to see Brody crawling around the forest / wilderness. Throw in a hallucination here and a mountain lion there, and that's the whole film. Not too entertaining, even with the few appearances of the mountain lion – and that says a lot about the approach director Michael Greenspan took with the film.

Despite Adrien being a great actor and doing his absolute best with the script, the film never really delivers on the suspense or the thrills. It's a one-man show that goes absolutely nowhere, and that's not Brody's fault. Greenspan never picks up the pace of the film; he uses flashbacks and hallucinations ineffectively; and tries to build suspense around a story-line that just doesn't have any.

If you want to see a great survival film with few characters that gets it right, watch Frozen, 127 Hours with James Franco, or the classic Cast Away with Tom Hanks.

127 Hours [2010] and Wrecked [2011] contain similar plots and big name actors (James Franco and Adrien Brody). They are set in a minimal location with a suffocating feel. One is based on a true story; the other is fiction. During the long middle stretch of movie, 127 Hours substitutes emotional highs and lows in the score instead of conflict/action, which Wrecked does a much better job at. A raw comparison of the plots gives 127 Hours a harsh reality, while Wrecked puts us inside Brody's mind of amnesia and hallucination. They end the same, but with a little help from Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Ros, 127 Hours manages to finish on a higher note. One was nominated for best picture, and one gets a shoddy rating on IMDb.

I do not believe the term, "Based on a true story," can cover up moments of less perfection. True stories are not commercial box office hits. That's how "based on a true story" came to be, to fantasize and fictionalize the true story into film mythology. The writer's job is to make a story's conflict much like a concert. If a story contains all truth and is boring, there should be rewrites until we are moved, with bits of conflict that can sensationalize the boring truth.

For this reason, where 127 Hours lags, Wrecked excels, and where 127 Hours must stick to a certain blue print, Wrecked can explore the mind of the protagonist in great depth. Plan on seeing an underrated, captivating, Adrien Brody indie in 2011.

I stumbled upon this 2010 movie titled "Wrecked" by random luck in 2021. I hadn't even heard about it, but seeing that the cover had Adrien Brody on it was actually sufficient to make me want to watch the movie.

So I sat down and watched the movie from writer Christopher Dodd and director Michael Greenspan, and I must say that was I genuinely entertained by what they delivered with this movie.

The storyline is one that you have to experience to fully take it in, as there are some really well-written plot changes along the way. And I totally love the way that writer Christopher Dodd constructed the story here, and then changed the course of the story twice or three times along the way, fully and wholeheartedly throwing me off course and changing the way that I felt about the main character every time. This was just glorious work from the writer.

"Wrecked" is a movie that might not find an appeal with just everyone in the audience I think, as it is a rather slow paced movie, and also a movie with almost just a single actor on the screen for the majority of the time. And there is little dialogue here as well, so yeah, this might not be everyone's cup of tea.

I have to say that Adrien Brody puts on a very memorable performance here with this movie and single-handedly carries the movie phenomenally well with the material he has from the script.

This is definitely a movie that I can warmly recommend you sit down to watch, especially if you like a movie that doesn't just follow a predictable narrative. I have to say that this movie was definitely unique and enjoyable.

My rating of "Wrecked" lands on a seven out of ten stars.