Ryan Reynolds acts his heart out alone on-screen for 90 minutes in this real-time thriller but a weak script fails to match his efforts…
Reynolds plays Paul Conroy, a civilian truck-driver in Iraq who wakes up after his convoy is ambushed to find that he’s been buried alive with only 90 minutes of oxygen left. He’s been left a phone with dodgy reception and a fading battery, and he fruitlessly calls his wife’s voicemail, a preposterously annoying neighbour, and various American agencies before the kidnapper rings to instruct Conroy to record and send his own ransom video. Comparisons to Tarantino’s CSI: LV special ‘Grave Danger’, which placed Nick Stokes in a coffin with only 12 hours for Grissom and his team to find him before the oxygen ran out, are inevitable. There are superficial similarities; the presence of a deadly weapon in the coffin, the intrusion of menacing fauna, the desperation that alternates between despair and panic; but also a shameless riff on Tarantino’s wonderful “Are you a terrorist?” “Well I guess that depends. Are you terrified?” But director Rodrigo Cortes is no Tarantino…
Cortes never leaves the coffin for the duration of the movie. This isn’t as Hitchcockian as he’d like because A Single Man cinematographer Eduard Grau’s six-minute takes include a ridiculous tracking shot around the coffin that makes it feel larger than some bed-sits. Reynolds displays considerable dramatic chops along with some nice comedic touches but his performance is better than Chris Sparling’s script. There are high-points in the writing like Stephen Tobolowsky as a HR man using legal chicanery to backslide on an insurance pay-out, while Robert Patterson’s crisp British voice is marvellous casting for Dan Brenner, the SAS type in charge of tracking down Conroy’s location, but mostly by staging conversations in the dark Cortes remove the visual field of reference to such an extent that this becomes a radio-play.
That fact focuses far too much attention onto the script, and it doesn’t take experience in screenwriting to realise just how few routes this story can take. Conroy frustratingly sits on vital information – for no reason, and there is an outrageous Chekhov’s Rifle of a detail that is left hanging before paying off as part of ‘the very oldest trick in the book’ – used in the deeply frustrating ending. Buried wants, structurally, to have its cake and eat it, and this only underscores its lack of profundity. In the end this is just needlessly nasty (Reynolds is forced to cut off his finger, pointlessly), perhaps in the wrong medium, and lacks the emotional power and depth to match Reynolds’ performance.
Reynolds fans will appreciate a fine turn that is a master-class in creating empathy out of thin air, but fans of suspense or drama would do well to avoid a film that can’t deliver on its promises.
2/5
Talking Movies 