Buried movie review
Review by fearnet
A few years back I visited with a bickering couple trapped in Open Water with a bunch of hungry sharks. Just last month I watched three unlucky kids get Frozen on a forgotten ski-lift. And just a few hours ago things got really claustrophobic as I watched Ryan Reynolds get Buried inside a coffin. I call ‘em “gimmick thrillers,” which isn’t a knock — unless you can’t pull the gimmick off.
Yep, virtually every frame of Rodrigo Cortes’ Buried takes place below ground, inside a coffin, with poor Ryan Reynolds clinging to every last drop of breath … although actually he never really comes close to suffocating, which is part of the flick’s problem. But more on that later.
The premise is this: Paul Conroy is an American truck driver working in Iraq, and as the film opens … we find Paul buried in a coffin with nothing but a Zippo (that is apparently heat-proof), a Blackberry, a pen, and a flask of alcohol. Slowly he begins to realize that this is no ordinary case of being buried alive (if there even is such a thing) — Paul is actually being held hostage in a rather impractical way. Apparently Paul’s abductors will come dig him up if someone can wire the kidnappers five million bucks. In two hours.
Review by Filmschoolrejects
Make no mistake, you can make a movie about one character inside a box interesting for 94 minutes. You just have to have the fortitude of young Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés. And you’re probably going to have to independently finance your film, as no studio entity would ever dare to make a movie such as this. Thankfully, Cortés found the money to make such a film, and he found the perfect one man to be his star, Ryan Reynolds. The product of these puzzle pieces fitting together is Buried, a movie that energized the crowd here in Park City, with no more than a zippo lighter and a cell phone.
The story is incredibly simple. Paul Conroy (Reynolds) was a contractor working as a truck driver in Iraq. When his convoy was attacked, he was captured and buried in a wooden box several feet below the desert. When he wakes up he is completely alone, terrified, and has only limited supplies (cell phone with settings in Arabic, Zippo lighter, flask of booze). This is where we first meet him, in the darkness. It seems brilliant, but (again) risky to start the movie with five minutes of nothing but sound. But it works. It is in this moment that Cortés shows his audience that this movie is about the experience of being buried alive, both for Paul Conroy and us.
As the story progresses, Paul becomes acquainted with his surroundings, finds the cell phone and begins calling any number he can remember. His wife, his friends, the company that put him in Iraq, and even the FBI. He’s in a frantic scramble to get someone to help, and as he’s met with mixed results (and countless voicemail boxes), he begins to lose hope. This goes on for a good part of the movie. I know that doesn’t exactly engaging, but it is. The raw emotion delivered by Reynolds, combined with a fantastically creative array of shot selections, many of which are very intimate and very uncomfortable to watch, make the movie engaging. As in, you spend most of the film’s runtime on the edge of your seat, waiting to see this mystery unravel.
Review by newsblaze
Horror can also come in small packages. Even a coffin, as the no frills, literally underground thriller Buried impressively confirms. Think interior decorating, and the many flourishes you can add to even a one room apartment if you let your imagination go to wild enough extremes, as Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés does in this interment for ransom thriller. Though hopefully the genius machinations of screenwriter Chris Sparling’s stylishly deranged hostage script won’t go to any terrorist heads anytime soon, when into novel moves while scheming a high price tag kidnapping.
Ryan Reynolds takes suffering for your art to unimaginable new depths in Buried as Paul Conroy, a war zone truck driver in Iraq who signed on to deliver rebuilding supplies because he was in serious need of the cash. Paul is no clueless contractor unaware of the dangers he’s facing, but the blue collar working stiff was apparently swayed by assurances from the company that his safety would not be on the line.
So when Paul wakes up after being knocked out temporarily from a head wound and finds himself buried alive in a wooden coffin in complete darkness and only a cigarette lighter and somebody else’s Arabic cell phone for company, he’s confident that his company, or in the least the US government, will make his rescue a top priority on their to-do list. Think again, Paul.
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