Fancy watching a film about a man stuck in a wrecked car and then crawling about the woods for an hour and a half? Well I didn’t either but we all have to make sacrifices!
Adrien Brody stars as the hapless motorist who wakes up in his wrecked car at the bottom of a ravine. He’s no idea how he’s got there, but his legs are trapped and he’s got a dead body in the back seat for company. The first half hour is almost without dialogue apart from the odd grunt, groan and curse. We endure Adrien’s pain as he tries to reach a dropped sweet and get something less crap on his one station radio.
Things slowly develop as he finds a gun under his seat and a credit card that may have his name on it - he’s got that selective movie amnesia, you see. He makes progress by inches and small triumphs such as getting some water from a passing hiker are soon dismissed as fantasy - or are they?
He hears a snippet on the news about dangerous bank robbers on the run - one of whom has the name that was on the credit card. After days of trying and pissing his pants, Adrien eventually manages to get out of the car and finds the boot is full of cash. But what can we believe? People appear and disappear and we’re clearly dealing with a man suffering from hallucinations here.
With no help in sight Adrien binds his shattered leg and tries to crawl to safety. He gains the friendship of a nice dog and a foe in the shape of a well trained mountain lion. He crawls for ages and falls into a river before, you’ve guessed it, arriving back at the wrecked car. He sees a man taking the loot from the boot and has visions of a nice lady and of pursuing police officers. Is he already dead and enduring a life in purgatory or are those pills he found not helping with the hallucinations? Can Adrien make it back to the road and untangle the wreckage of his existence?
‘Wrecked’ is pretty much as you expect if you’ve read a two line blurb on the DVD box. The good old device of movie amnesia is wrung for all it’s worth as Adrien tries to piece together his circumstances and life in general. Is he a desperate bank robber or an unfortunate in difficult circumstances? Clearly this thin plot needs some padding and we get it in spades as various quests eat up minutes of running time - that five minutes securing a mint totally wasn’t worth it!
It was clear from early on that most of the visions were just that, but they kept coming thick and fast all the same. The film did present a good sense of the desperation of the nameless lead character but there is only so much of a man crawling about that anyone needs. Brody did OK with thin material but I wasn’t really rooting for him at any stage - even when he shares his jerky with the dog. His make up was good and towards the end he was looking like an extra from ‘The Walking Dead’. The big denouement offered no surprises and the narrative couldn’t be more plain as it ended on a ‘here’s how it all happened, kids!’ sequence so as to rob you of any sense of mystery or interpretation.
All in all it was better than being stuck crawling about in a forest with a broken leg but only just!
THE Tag Line : Get wrecked instead of getting ‘Wrecked’
'W' Rating 12/23
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