The creative premise of Buried–one actor, one room (such as it is) for 94 minutes–is an ingenious one. But any first-year film student can tell you that one ingenious idea does not make a great film. Thankfully, this clever thriller is executed well enough to be more than just a one-trick pony.
The film opens in total darkness. A Zippo lighter clicks to life revealing Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) laying flat in a pine box that’s buried underground. He struggles at first to break free by kicking at the boards and trying to pry them loose. But Paul, unlike The Bride in Kill Bill, is not going anywhere.
Along with the lighter, Paul finds a pen, a pocketknife, and his new closest friend, a fully charged cell phone. We learn through a series of frantic calls to 911, the FBI, the State Department, and his own family that Paul is a civilian truck driver in Iraq whose convoy was ambushed while delivering supplies to a community center. But Paul’s non-military status means little to his captor (voiced by Jose Luis Garcia-Perez) who calls to let Paul know that he has two hours, roughly the amount of time his air supply will last, to produce $5 million.
Written by Chris Sparling, Buried is a message-driven thriller that’s helped rather than hampered by its claustrophobic setting. If you think hold music, answering machines and dropped calls are maddening, imagine encountering them while slowly running out of air in a coffin. There’s also another underlying message: In spite of all the technology that’s designed to keep us more connected, we’re more isolated than ever before. A conversation Paul has with his mother, who is suffering from dementia, makes it clear that he was alone long before his kidnapper got to him.
Spanish director Rodrigo Cortes’s use of intermittent darkness drives the real-time story forward in a way that keeps the mystery fresh. He combines this with a solid score, some masterful tight-quarters action shooting (as if Paul isn’t having a bad enough day, at one point a snake decides to share his bed) and some crucial close-ups of Reynolds’s increasingly desperate face. It’s filmmaking so strong that you almost forget the underlying gimmick.
Almost. Reynolds, whose face is the only one we see for the entirety of the film, owns the screen too fully to ever put that ingenious gimmick out of your mind. Sparling’s tightly written screenplay should be credited with giving the actor a great place to work from but it’s ultimately Reynolds’s game to win or lose. He is at turns frantic, belligerent and vulnerable, getting each emotion and line delivery exactly right. Seriously, this is the same guy from Van Wilder and Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place? It looks like our little boy (I still remember him as Billy Simpson from the teen afterschool soap Fifteen on Nickelodeon) is all grown up. And it only took burying him alive to get there.
I was expecting him to get out and start kicking ass. The movie was pointless, he wasted his breath, he could of save his energy to get out the box lol! !
Ineresting concept but executed poorly. was beyond boring and laughab;e at times because there was no explaintation as to why they iraq people thought he was a solider at all. And why would they leeave him with a cell phone, pen and light source if they just wanted to kill him? I mean these are people with a belief that will make them sacifice themselves for thier god just to make a statement. why would they bother to torture him and not just simply kill him. two thumbs way down