Buried (2010)

Starring: Ryan Reynolds
Grade: A

Yes, the entire movie is Ryan Reynolds inside of a coffin, but don’t let that scare you off. Buried is very good.

Summary

On October 23rd, 2006, Paul Conroy (Reynolds) wakes up underground in a wooden coffin.

He’s gagged and his hands are tied as well. After turning on his lighter, he sees the situation he’s in, rips the gag out of his mouth, and starts screaming for help. He is able to cut the ties off his wrists by the use of a screw hanging down in the coffin. After he tries lifting the door to no avail, his phone rings. Frantically searching for it, he tries everything to move around and grab it. He is able to retrieve it but just misses the call. Even so, he looks at the phone and finds everything on it is in Arabic. He tries to remember a number, but he can’t. Paul pulls everything out of his pockets to look for the paper with a number on it, but it’s nowhere. He calls 911 instead and explains his situation. He’s somewhere in Iraq, but he doesn’t know where exactly nor does he know how he got into the coffin. He’s an American truck driver and civilian contractor working for CRT (Crestin, Roland, and Thomas). They were attacked in the Diyala Province in Baqubah and terrorists shot all the other drivers. Paul says he received a safety number to call, but he doesn’t know where it is. The lady on the other line tells him the number he called is in Youngstown, Ohio, so she can’t really help him, offering to transfer him to the sheriff’s department. Paul gets frustrated and hangs up.

This is where we see his battery decrease.

Paul calls his home, but no one picks up, so he leaves a message for his wife Linda to contact the National Guard, the Pentagon, or whoever else to come help him. He calls her cell phone directly, but there’s still no answer. Even then, he begs her to call back.

Now, he’s having trouble breathing.

He calls to be connected to the FBI and is finally connected to Special Agent Harris. He tells Harris that him and a convoy of other drivers were delivering kitchen supplies to a community center. Some kids started throwing rocks at the trucks. Afterwards, an IED (improvised explosive device) went off and blew up one of the trucks. This led to a group of terrorists coming out and shooting everyone in the area. He was hit in the head by one of the rocks however and blacked out right after this. Then, he woke up in the coffin tied up. Harris seems weirded out these terrorists didn’t shoot Paul as well, so he asks Paul for his social security number. A frustrated Paul starts to get angry (because this questioning is ridiculously unnecessary), but he loses signal in the middle of his outburst and drops the call. He moves around and gets service in a very specific spot and calls CRT. They transfer him to the director of personnel, but he gets the answering machine. In the middle of his call for help in the voicemail, he drops the call again. He decides to call back the first number that called him earlier (the one he missed), and as he does, he writes the number down on the cover of the coffin.

Sadly, it’s his kidnapper, Jabir. Jabir knows exactly what he did and shows no remorse, demanding a $5 million ransom by 9PM, or Paul will stay there. Since Paul’s family doesn’t have the money, Jabir tells him to get the money from the embassy and hangs up.

Well, the race is on. Sadly, bureaucratic decisions as well as Paul’s own troubles may cost him dearly.

My Thoughts:

Depending on the mood you’re in, Buried may be one of the most innovative and gripping thrillers you’ll see all year, or the most frustrating film you’ve ever watched.

The frustration you feel in this short of a timespan is outrageous, but it’s 100% realistic. This is mostly because every phone call that Paul has to make to try and save his life, is almost never met with someone who has the same amount of urgency as him. Buried felt like an unofficial attack on the consumer side of customer service, and I support it wholeheartedly. Throughout, I was getting flashbacks to the many arguments I’ve had with Comcast over the phone about hidden fees and price changes.

Absolute fucking clowns those guys are.

Anyway, he’s met with consistent bureaucratic bullshit by almost every encounter he has with the “good” side that’s supposed to help him, and it’s hard not to react just as Paul does. It’s as if no one is taking this as seriously as they should nor do they understand things from his point of view (or even try to). One great moment that stands out is when he’s told that the United States doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, so they can’t just give over the ransom money. Paul hits her with, “Well, it’s easy for you to say in an air-conditioned office”. What a way to put everything into perspective! Everyone who’s there to “help” him has never been in the position he’s in because you know damn well if they were the ones in Paul’s situation, they’d be losing it too with a response like that. They never match his energy. They even have the audacity to get mad at him when he starts getting angry with their asinine questioning. The one thing he doesn’t have is time, and there are so many responses he gets that waste his time exponentially. It really rallies the audience behind Paul because we see the phone battery dying, we see the tools that will only give him light for a limited amount of time, and we understand the gravity of the situation he’s in. To see the people on the other side of the phone react as they do is maddening on another level.

It doesn’t help that he can’t stop dropping calls either. It makes me think that not only is this movie an attack on customer service workers but also on T-Mobile.

Seriously though, it’s hard not to flip out. For instance, did the one woman truly need the exact location of the FBI office Paul wants to talk to? Paul literally asked her to pick any of them because it didn’t matter, but she apparently can’t make this decision and has to hear it from him. Is this truly necessary? She can’t make an exception considering the tone and urgency of his voice?! I doubt it and that’s why Paul’s anger is completely warranted. Everyone gives him an attitude like it’s his fault he was kidnapped by a terrorist and put into a coffin underground, and the people that are “helping” are telling him to be calm like they’ve been in the situation before. Well assholes, no one’s been in this situation before! You’ve only worked with other people that were and are now labeled as “experts” no matter the ratio of people you’ve actually saved. It’s infuriating to watch, but again, it’s 100% realistic. Going along with this, I loved when Paul flipped out on Linda’s sister Donna who had the gall to say she doesn’t have time because she’s going to the store.

I hope she lives with that guilt for the rest of her fictional life for how she treated Paul in his worst moment!

One thing that bothered me is that he calls his wife and family phone a few times, and they don’t answer until literally the final minute of the movie. How? What in the fuck were they doing? Even if they were sleeping, I just find it hard to believe that he couldn’t reach them once throughout this time span. They had to have seen the missed calls and messages! Even if it was during a workday, they would’ve eventually saw it. His ransom video went viral and was all over the news! How in the hell did it take Linda that long to see it?! Also, he’s asked why he even took this job, and he explains that he needed the money. Towards the end, he says he has $700 in his savings account…

Dude, are you kidding? You only have $700 in your savings account, at that age, while having a family? You deserve an ass kicking for that alone. You couldn’t have found a truck driving job in America?! I’m poor too, but I wouldn’t take a job in Iraq! How do you land on this moronic of a decision?

Well, I guess that’s probably why he’s got that little saved up. Paul has a history of bad decision making as we see here. He should’ve just turned to a life of crime. It’s so much easier and the risk is just about the same. Plus, you wouldn’t have to move to the Middle East.

Ryan Reynolds may not be someone’s initial choice to lead a film like this, but he brings it like none other, churning out a fantastic performance that showcases how underrated of an actor he is when given the chance to show it. He doesn’t get nearly enough praise for what he was able to do in this film with such raw emotion and realism. With the limitations of this premise, you have to have a great lead performance for this role, otherwise this crazy idea can fall apart in an instant. Thankfully, Reynolds absolutely nails it.

The twist with Paul’s not-so-perfect stint at CRT was also unexpected and was a great final “fuck you” for the character too. Whoever wrote the screenplay was clearly going through some shit.

Buried shows a human being at his absolute limit in the ultimate test of survival. How would you react when faced with a problem like this, knowing that time is running out on your phone battery, your source of light, and your oxygen levels? It’s wild watching this race against time being in one location and in the dark. Movies like this don’t come often because of how difficult it is to pull off, but director Rodrigo Cortés manages to pull off the impossible. The cinematography and the direction match the pacing, and despite the film not moving, we’re on the edge of our seat for a lot of it, leading us to an ending that is masterfully constructed. With frantic pacing that makes you feel like you’re on the clock, Buried makes its one location a strength to give us an incredible, suspense-filled thriller.

It keeps you engaged from beginning to end and that’s really all you can ask for in a movie like this.