Wrecked movie

Adrien Brody earned an Oscar for struggling with every indignity the Nazis could throw at him in The Pianist, so perhaps someone figured there might be an audience eager to watch him be thoroughly miserable for 90 minutes. In Wrecked, Brody is alone onscreen for nearly the entire film, quite literally crawling through the wilderness as he struggles to survive with no food, no tools, no memory, and a broken leg, trying to figure out what happened to him and how he can make it back to safety and civilization.

As Wrecked opens, we see a man who is seriously bruised and bloody strapped into the passenger seat of an old Chevy that’s been wrecked in a forest clearing at the bottom of a steep hill. The man has a badly broken leg that makes it agony for him to move, and the accident that stranded the car has also jammed the door shut; for the first 25 minutes of the movie, the nameless man can do little more than sit in his seat, howl in agony, and occasionally struggle to free himself. What’s more, the man can’t remember his name, the identity of the dead man in the back seat, or the events that caused the accident, though the gun he finds under the driver’s seat and the gym bag full of cash in the trunk suggests something nefarious was happening before the car went off the road. Eventually, the man is able to make his way out of the car and create a makeshift splint for his leg, but left to his own devices, he’s almost in worse shape than before as he drags himself through the forest, over the hills, and into a river, desperately hoping someone will find him, accompanied only by a stray dog who sometimes happens by and a beautiful hiker who is just a persistent hallucination.

It’s not hard to see why Wrecked might appeal to an adventurous actor such as Adrien Brody, since it presents a remarkable creative challenge — one man has to carry the whole film for an hour and a half, with very little interaction with other performers to help define the character or move the story along. There’s no arguing that Brody gives his role in Wrecked everything he’s got, and he makes his nameless character’s agony (both physical and emotional) and desperate ingenuity seem vividly real throughout. However, as hard as Brody tries, that’s just not enough of a foundation for a feature film, and much of the time Wrecked feels like a short subject that’s been padded to twice its appropriate length. Screenwriter Christopher Dodd tries to give his main character enough to do to fill out the time, but when he resorts to giving the guy both a dog and a love interest that isn’t really there, it’s hard not to sense the desperation in the air. And while cameraman James Liston makes the man’s journey look suitably harrowing while capturing the rugged beauty of the Pacific Northwest and the effects makeup is stomach-churningly convincing, director Michael Greenspan (making his feature debut) doesn’t seem to know how to pace this story and often relies on red herrings and “surprises” borrowed from other movies to keep the film creeping along to its less-than-satisfying conclusion. Adrien Brody is to be commended for suffering for his art in Wrecked, but it’s a shame the art in question doesn’t seem to be worth all the trouble.