The Details

Buried

Ryan Reynolds

Directed by Rodrigo Cortes

Rated R

Beyond the Weekly

Buried

IMDb: Buried

Rotten Tomatoes: Buried

Buried is a dream-come-true showcase for an actor, and star Ryan Reynolds does a good job of rising to the occasion, proving he has chops beyond his best-known roles in dopey comedies and overblown action movies. He stretches himself to the breaking point as Paul Conroy, a civilian truck driver in Iraq who finds himself kidnapped and buried alive in a wooden coffin, with nothing but a cell phone, a lighter and a handful of rudimentary tools to keep him company.

Reynolds gives it all he has, but even so, there’s just not enough material here to sustain a 90-minute movie, and you can almost sense the desperation of screenwriter Chris Sparling a little past the halfway mark, as he struggles to throw in new complications to make Paul’s predicament even more excruciating. The movie goes from tense and somewhat resonant, with its commentary on the callousness of corporations and the government toward low-level workers, to absurd and unbelievable, piling on developments that strain the limits of the high-concept premise. What could be a Hitchcockian exercise in thriller minimalism ends up descending into contrivance and silliness.