Rodrigo Cortes' Buried is a great example of a tremendous idea that is terrible executed and how the end result is pretty horrible. The film opens with a black screen and a some panting and fumbling from a man. After a few agonizing minutes (it might actually only be a few seconds, but it feels like it's going on forever) a Zippo lighter is lit and we see a man (Ryan Reynolds) who is tied bound and gagged in a shallow coffin, dirty and bleeding. He screams and tries to push is way out, but he seems to be buried under sand.
After a few minutes a mobile phone rings near his feet. He reaches down to grab it and misses the call. He begins calling numbers he knows: his wife in Western Michigan; 411 information; the FBI field office; the company he works for. He is a contractor in Iraq, a truck driver, and it seems that his convoy was hit by an IUD. He blacked and and all he knows is that now he is where he is. (We find out later that it is October 2006.)
Ultimately he gets a call from the kidnappers who tell him they need $5million by 9pm or they will let him die in the coffin. It is about 7:30 at this point. He calls the State Department and they put him through to a hostage negotiating team in Iraq and a guy who can help to find him or at least try to calm his nerves. It seems he's not only running out of time on the clock, but his phone is running out of batteries and he might also be running out of air.
The premise is great and sorta reminiscent of a clumsy Hitchcockian idea (actually the poster and the opening titles are clearly inspired by Saul Bass and give a very Hitchcockian feeling even before the film begins). But the execution of the film is nothing even close to Hitch. At nearly every turn Cortes makes bad decisions and goes more for the shock/thriller aspect of the story than the interesting psycho-terror-drama aspects of the story that Hitch would have certainly enjoyed more. Basically the script is full of cheap gags and a bunch of unexplainable details.
At one point Reynolds is told by the hostage helper guy that he should conserve his phone battery life by putting the phone on a sound ringer rather than a vibrate. He doesn't do this- and for no particular reason. Later he takes a brief nap and wakes to find a black snake in his pants. Huh?! How did a snake get in his pants? We see the snake slither out of a hole in the side of the coffin (a hole that was never there before) - so are we to believe that the snake came into the box, found the leg of his trousers, went up one side and then down the other side and then out the hole again? Smart snake!
I am impressed that the entire film takes place inside the coffin with the camera only on Reynolds for 95 minutes and doesn't get particularly dull, but this feeling is tempered by the absolute idiocy of most of the writing. Reynolds frequently gets furious and yells a people he calls when they don't understand the situation he's in. I totally get that he's frustrated and panicky, but at some point shouldn't he figure out that he can get more help if he's calm than if he's worked up?
I would love to see this done again with a better script. Screenwriter Chris Sparling clearly has horror movies on his mind more than good suspense films and I think this does the film a disservice. I know this concept can be done better.
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They might have come up with a much smarter script. But I can't help feeling this is really just fodder for a short. A half hour twilight zone episode would be the ideal format for this idea. Not a 90 minute feature film.
ReplyDeleteA short would have been good - but I think it could be done well as a 90-mintue film. I mean the execution here was so bad, it's hard to say.
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