Notice to Readers: Wrecked (2010)
Would’ve happily watched 90 minutes of Adrien Brody stuck in a wrecked car with a corpse and a hallucinated dog. Instead, we get a memory plot.
Adrien Brody wakes up in a wrecked car in the middle of nowhere with a gun, a broken leg, and a dead guy in the backseat. It’s a one-man psychological thriller, and I respect the effort, but mostly I kept thinking: wherever this is supposed to take place, do not choose it for a hiking trip. There are dead bodies everywhere.
Wrecked could’ve been a tight, 90-minute pressure cooker inside the car—just Brody, the corpse, and a bobcat—but instead it tries to get clever. Flashbacks. Hallucinations. A possibly imaginary dog. A whole subplot about whether he’s the victim or the criminal. It’s like Buried meets The Revenant meets that guy you dated in college who made everything more complicated than it had to be.
And just when you’re prepared for the big “he’s actually the villain” reveal—surprise!—he’s a nice guy after all. A completely innocent victim caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. You know this because:
a.) he puts on his seatbelt
b.) he’s nice to the possibly imaginary dog
c.) his memory conveniently comes back in the last five minutes, which is maybe the least interesting way to learn anything.
I mean… I wanted to love it. I liked the dog. But this movie is doing the absolute most and still kind of ends up face-down in the ferns.
Filed under: Survival | Guy in Distress | One-man Show | Bummer Ending Energy | Forests with Terrible Yelp Reviews