Wrecked (2011)

When Rodrigo Cortes thriller Buried became a box office smash last year with very little investment, it was inevitable that several clones would follow.  The first out of the starting gate is Wrecked. 

Adrien Brody stars Ray, a man who awakes at the bottom of a ravine, with a severe case of amnesia. Having gone off the road into the ravine, he looks around and sees the dead bodies of his two fellow passengers. His leg is broken, so travelling away from the scene is not as easy as he hopes, that is once he manages to free himself from his car. As day turns to night, and once again, Ray is haunted by a combination of his memories that blur the lines of reality causing him to battle against both the outdoors, and his mind.

Wrecked is a difficult movie to get to grips with, not because it is complicated in anyway, but because every single aspect seems incredibly drawn out. It takes about ten minutes for Ray to pull himself from the wreckage, almost as if it was trying to fill a void of time. The whole movie follows the same rigmarole, creating a level of alienation between itself and the audience. 

Secondly there is the mental issue, as Ray battles with his mind, its very clear that is exactly what he is doing; yet you cannot help but think that the movie thinks its being clever, maybe you are meant to believe the discussions he is having, are real and not just figments of his imagination, or memories from the past.

Finally there is the frustration, a portion of the movie takes Ray on a journey, over land and into the water, only to get back to exactly the same point he began in, at which point you think something has happened that has not, the results of which are even more disappointing.

In Buried the character played by Ryan Reynolds kept the audiences attention by being able to make contact with the outside world by phone. In Wrecked it’s a battle with himself, and it’s simply not the same power. A telephone conversation or series of conversations allow for varying circumstances and different personalities; but when you’re conversing with yourself the answers will always be the same.

The lines that are blurred between fact and reality also create an issue, because there are certain aspects that are unexplained, were they part of his mind, or were they real. Looking at the IMDB forums, some of these issues are causing people great confusion.

As the movie draws to a close, it really starts to think it is getting a bit clever, but the reality is that it is not. The big shock, is the one thing that everyone thought it was from the offset, and an opportunity to take the story down a supernatural route which would prevent it being a Buried clone was completely ignored.

Sadly you cannot even commend Brody on his performance, because it’s really quite difficult to gauge given to the many lumbering problems the movie has. Buried was a breeze of a movie, Wrecked on the other hand is a real chore, and a frustrating painful one at times.