What do you call Ryan Reynolds stuck in a box for ninety minutes? Director Rodrigo Cortés calls it Buried, and it’s a one-man, one-locale thriller featuring the Reynolds buried alive in a tiny little wooden coffin, and his desperate attempts to secure his release with the aid of a cell phone. It’s tense and well made and almost makes for a great movie. But as it is, Buried is only decent, thanks mostly to a lackluster script that fails in the most important aspects of storytelling, namely, characterization.
Technically speaking, the direction of this movie is pretty great. The obvious problem with a premise like this is how do you keep things visually interesting? How do you keep the audience from getting bored with the same image throughout the whole movie? Cortés utilizes a handful of neat tricks to keep things humming along nicely. The movie starts out with several minutes of pure darkness, and all the audience can hear is a person sleeping, waking up and then realizing they are in a horrible predicament. Finally a Zippo lighter flicks on and we have a small light source in the coffin. A little while after that, a cell phone is found and the blue light from the phone’s screen illuminates the coffin’s interior, and we now have two distinct light sources to play with and to keep things looking different. Cortés eventually finds ways to introduce green and red light into the equation as well, and by mixing up all the colors and light sources, the movie definitely stays visually fresh, despite never once leaving the coffin (unlike the recent film Devil, in which the film takes every chance possible to take the story out of the elevator in which the central characters are trapped).
Though that’s not entirely true, because there are a handful of moments In Buried when we do leave the tight confines of the coffin. That’s not to say that the movie cuts to shots of people on the other end of the cell phone – instead there are a few moments when the camera pulls back from Reynolds, obviously passing through what would be the top of the box and the dirt that covers it, but as Reynolds and his coffin get smaller, the edges stay black, and he’s alone in the screen, just like he’s alone in the box and alone under the ground. And trust me, you’ll never feel more alone than when you are placed on hold whilst buried alive. There are also a handful of shots that slowly rotate around the outside of the coffin, giving us a view of Reynolds through the tiniest slats between the pieces of wood, and another shot that travels through the dirt before popping through a hole in the side of the coffin and bringing us back inside. But otherwise, it is mostly shots of Ryan Reynolds’ face in various levels of close up, while he talks on the phone and jots down notes on the ceiling of the coffin.
Which brings us to where Buried stumbles in the story telling department – Reynolds plays a civilian contractor in Iraq, who was working as a truck driver when his convoy got ambushed and he was taken for ransom, and that is the extent of his character. That and he gets angry very easily. And he’s nice to his mom. And he loves his family. There is no attempt to make this character an actual person, or give him any sort of character arc, or even give the story any sort of real development. It’s mostly someone buried alive and doing all the things we would think of doing. It feels like they might have been trying to make a real on-the-nose point about the use and treatment of civilian workers in war ones by private companies, and how corporations and military forces would rather keep hostage situations out of the news than try to actually save the hostages, but in the end, none of it matters if the audience doesn’t care about the man inside the box, and I don’t see how anyone can care about this guy. He’s often rude and abrasive, and sure he’s in a horrible situation and wants nothing more than to live, but he’s still very quick to call people names and start yelling over the phone, and it is hard not to think of this guy as a prick. So where’s the empathy for this guy? Are we simply supposed to imagine ourselves in the same situation? Would that be enough to make people care about what happens to this particular character?
Buried isn’t a bad movie, it just doesn’t seem to have much reason for existing, other than as a directorial exercise in single-location filmmaking. It gets tense and surprisingly crazy for a film about a guy staying in one spot and making frustrating phone call after frustrating phone call, but when it ends, there is a distinct feeling of “so what?” It doesn’t help that the ending feels a little cheap; it is very predictable, and there’s nothing worse than sending audiences out on a kind of crappy conclusion. But what the hell? This will make for a fun rainy day rental, that’s for sure. The concept and filming techniques are interesting enough to make up for the lack of character development and plotting, but they are not enough to elevate Buried to great movie status. Instead it's something that is worth checking out once for the intrigue factor of how they pulled it off, but don't expect anything that's going to change the way you look at movies or at life. It's just a distraction. A Saturday afternoon at the theater. A cold winter night snuggled up on the couch with your special lady friend. A long plane ride across the country. These are the moments in which to take in something like Buried, the unfortunate epitome of disposable entertainment.
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