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Lunch » Tags » Photos » Reviews » Wrecked Review By Julian Left - MovieWeb.com

Wrecked Review By Julian Left - MovieWeb.com

1 rating: -1.0

Movie Reviews by Julian Left

Wrecked Review By Julian Left starring Adrien Brody, Caroline Dhavernas, Ryan Robbins, Adrian Holmes, Jacob Blair. Visit MovieWeb for Photos, Showtimes, Cast, Crew, Reviews, Plot Summary, Comments, Discussions, Taglines, Trailers, Videos, Posters and … see full wiki

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1 review about Wrecked Review By Julian Left - MovieWeb.com

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I'm left with nothing...

Jul 15, 2011

by julianleft
posted in Movie Hype

Rating:

-1

Michael Greenspan's debut "Wrecked" it's an ambitious film with a good premise that has significant problems with it's identity. It tries to be both a character study and a situation study while challenging themes like "redemption", "faith", "men's natural instict" or "the fight for survival".

Adrien Brody stars as this guy who wakes up after being involved in a car accident in a forest medium. At the beginning he's confused and tries to acknowledge what happened. He sees the dead bodies of two other males, he sees himself wounded and full of scars and coagulated blood. His state of mind balances from desperation to calm. Sometimes he panics and sometimes he uses reason to think about what happened. He has a short memory loss since he can't figure out who the other guys were. He spends two days trapped in the car with an injured leg without food and water. He's suddenly visited by a young woman who brings him water and food but she disappears the same way she appeared. Now you're questioning the point of this film. Is it trying to connect two worlds? The world of the living and the world of the dead? What it wants to achieve? Well... you don't know that yet because the movie feels just wrongly constructed. You don't get a sense of the purpose of this even if you might get what's with the strange woman visiting him from the beginning because it is an element used before in films like this. Now, the appearance of a gun and the broadcast of some radio news will change things for our protagonist. He finds out that he's in fact, a criminal, a robber and that the other two men were part of his team and that they are responsible for the death of one person. Now the woman who appears constantly is obvious is the woman killed in that bank robbery. She "whispers" him that even if he'll survive and get out of that forest he won't be able to really get away with things. However, the fight for survival interferes and Adrien Brody enters into a journey of liberation accompanied by this weird "warm" and friendly dog. From this point on, if you'll not be bored yet thanks to the terrible pacing and the obviousness of the script, you will get bored because nothing spectacular will happen. This is not even a character study. We don't get to really see what our character feels, we don't get to see what's in his mind, we just see a bland and foggy image of him trying to save his life. This topic provides a multitude of legit approached that the director could have chosen yet he's obsessed with stale shots and obvious development of the situations.

I think Michael Greenspan is a fan of Tarkovskiy. I'm saying this because a lot of those shots, a lot of the mixed fix landscapes and suspenseful music reminded me of Tarkovskiy. The problem is Tarkovskiy's movies have a heart, have a message, have a deep but strong essence, each shot delivers something, the atmosphere in them is stunningly immersive and surreal. This movie needed to be realistic as hell and to feel surreal. Speaking of surrealism, you'll have Brody walking in straight line, along some river with this dog and end up in the same place were the accident happened. Now you're having a Blair Witch Project reminiscence. You're thinking this might lead to something and probably that all the time spent with this character was not for nothing. You get him having confrontations with this woman, you get him showing signs of paranoia, of madness, of rage and anger. That is pretty obvious since he considers her as the reason for this infinite space of time he's trapped in. After a while of continuously moving around this circle, he has a small explosion of consciousness and reminds what really happened. That experience alone feels like a shocker for him but not really for us given the fact that the dialogue between him and this woman give us plenty of reasons to think about it and validate this scenery before we get acknowledged with it. In the end, we get a feeling of "that was it?". I didn't found any metaphorical content, any emotional impact, any reason for me to simply care. It was just a stale and mediocre piece of filmmaking.

Now Brody caries his character with more than just decency. Brody is a good actor that can only offer what the script can offer and since the script was poorly written on Brody's character, we get to see him trying to light a spark of life into our protagonist and make us not close the movie or walk out of theater 10 minutes in. The execution of this movie, like I mentioned earlier, is influences by Tarkovskiy's Stalker. You see the director tries to do something ambitions but falls right short. The cinematography is good, feels natural, the lightning is good but there's no sign of the DP playing with us and playing with his color and his lenses. It's just like he shot each frame in the same manner. If this was on purpose then it didn't actually work on me. The music feels tense but there's no tension in the film so it doesn't progress right. The editing sometimes looks choppy and the blood and wound effects and makeup don't look as real as I thought they should have looked.

On short, I was disappointed because I thought the premise of the movie would be interesting and that this might be a decent start for this filmmaker but I was proven wrong. This film tries to be too serious and too methodic and tries to be realistic while feeling surreal and it just becomes dull and pointless. I'm left with nothing...

Storyline/Dialogue: 5/10.
Acting: 8/10.
Technical Execution: 7,3/10.
Replay Value: 2/10.
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Overall: 5.6

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