Buried
Directed by Rodrigo Cortes. With Ryan Reynolds. 1 hr. 35. R (profanity, some violent content). Playing at: area theaters. You have to remind yourself to breathe. It's not that you're literally stuck, in a coffin, with Ryan Reynolds for the 90 minutes he's Buried. But this everybody's-worst-nightmare thriller makes you feel you are, fretting that you're using up some of his oxygen. Buried works on you that way.
Directed by Rodrigo Cortes. With Ryan Reynolds. 1 hr. 35. R (profanity, some violent content). Playing at: area theaters.
You have to remind yourself to breathe. It's not that you're literally stuck, in a coffin, with Ryan Reynolds for the 90 minutes he's Buried. But this everybody's-worst-nightmare thriller makes you feel you are, fretting that you're using up some of his oxygen. Buried works on you that way.
A lean single-character exercise in limited space, limited movement, and extreme close-ups, Buried is closer to this experience - kidnapped, entombed with just a cell phone and a Zippo lighter - than anyone would care to be.
A man wakes up. He's bound and gagged. We see only his face when he's able to get his lighter to work. And what he sees - the walls of a pine box, dirt occasionally dribbling in through cracks - is as chilling as it gets.
Where is he? How did he end up there? How can he get out?
Reynolds plays this working-class Joe's reactions right on the mark - confusion, panic, hysteria, rage. Whoever tossed him in there left a cell phone. The lettering on it is Arabic, but it's his one hope of escape.
Filmmaker Rodrigo Cortes limits us to this man's world - the box he's in, what he can experience/discover through that mysterious phone. Reynolds' acting is mainly through the buried man's increasingly frantic phone calls - getting people to pick up the phone, forcing the disembodied voice on the other end to take him seriously.
Cortes (and writer Chris Sparling) make darkly humorous observations about the foibles of cell phones - crawling around in a box underground, trying to get reception. But Buried is also an ad for this vital tool of modern life - the ability to call anywhere and everywhere, leaving fearful goodbyes, uploading photos and video, lighting the darkness. It's a pity this phone doesn't have a Web browser.
The movie loses its ticking-clock urgency at times. And it tips over into melodrama in its final third. But the performance and those who capture it on film put us in that box with Reynolds, make us feel his terror, and leave us gasping and muttering at the screen - "Hey man. That lighter's burning up our air!"
- Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel