REVIEW : BURIED

BURIED

Boxes are some scary shit aren’t they? If you’re in a horror movie, you definitely don’t want to find a mysterious one. Just ask Cameron Diaz, or the cast of any of the Hellraiser movies, they’ll tell you. But what you don’t want even more than that is to wake up inside one with no idea where you are or how you got there. Unless you’re into that kind of thing, No? Then lets move on.

Buried is a simple premise, Ryan Reynolds wakes up 6 feet under with no idea how he got there or why someone would do this to him. Slowly but surely we find out the whys, the what’s and the how’s.

Buried was a concept so simple that it almost seemed doomed to failure, especially after such films as the mediocre Phone Booth, I figured that if a film with a guy trapped in a phone box was hard to pull off, then guy in a box would be close to impossible. But here we are and guess what? It works.

Buried works for two reasons and of course they are the most important two things in any film. Script and casting. The film is phenomenally well written, and never leaves the box in question. But it never needs to, the film never feels like it slows down and believe me it should, but it never suffers from any kind of drag, we feel the tension all the way. Which brings me to my second point.

Casting Ryan Reynolds is a stroke of genius, ok he’s an obvious Hollywood choice. But one thing we forget about Van Wilder, is that he actually has the chops for it and he carries the tension from frantic beginning to nail biting end and in my eyes never makes any unrealistic decisions for the sake of driving the film home.

Buried is a well but together film and is also well shot as an added bonus. The only qualm I have here is that the whole film takes a very different direction of the why our hero finds himself in the box to what I would have imagined or preferred. Some will like it, for me it was the easy way out, but I’ll leave that down to preference and of course will not spoil the film for you.

OVERALL

Buried shouldn’t work, but it does. The film is so tight that its actually hard to give you any kind of description about it without ruining it for you. But I will say, watch out for a snake moment that puts Indiana Jones to shame, and Indy had the whole world to hide, Reynolds only has a box. Just watch it.