Don’t forget your shovel…

FILM REVIEW

Buried
DIRECTED BY: Rodrigo Cortes
STARRING: Ryan Reynolds, Robert Patterson, Samantha Mathis
CERT: 15A

Buried alive. The great old terror. Awful things come to mind, but always the first thing to pop in my head is a memory of Brush Shiels on the Late Late Show, back in the day. Gay Byrne was steering the interview along in his grand old fashion and starting to get a bit personal.
“Your father is dead, is that right?” asked Gaybo.
“I hope so,” Brush grinned. “We buried him 15 years ago.”
The hero of Buried would appreciate the joke. As the film opens, he wakes in the dark and scrabbles around groggily for a minute before flicking on a lighter and discovering he’s in a coffin. An unpleasant surprise, no doubt and he reacts in an understandably mad panic.
“Why doesn’t he do an Uma?” you can almost hear the audience ask. Hmm, maybe because this isn’t a dumb Tarantino martial arts movie? Just a guess.
Anyway, on the upside, this coffin is a tad bigger than most caskets, which means a bit more air. Around 90 minutes of it, roughly. And the man inside (Reynolds) is equipped with some items to which the average graveyard resident probably wouldn’t have immediate access. Like the Zippo, a pen and a pocket knife. Which are handy, certainly enough there for MacGyver to blow his way out of the crypt before the closing credits.
But no need for that just yet. Because this chap also has a mobile phone in his pocket, with plenty of juice and a decent signal. So he makes a few calls to his wife (Mathis) and by the usual roundabout bureaucratic way, to the authorities. He also receives the odd call, from a strange fellow talking about large sums of money.
And so we learn that the man in the coffin is Paul Conroy, that he is a civilian truck driver and that his convoy was attacked by Iraqi insurgents while on its way to deliver kitchen supplies to a community centre. Conroy was captured and is now being held ransom for $5 million.
Naturally, the State Department informs him that the US Government does not negotiate with terrorists. So well, that leaves our man in a spot of bother, with the clock running down and the air running out.
Now, you could say that if he wasn’t so fond of the old Zippo, the air might last a bit longer. And that he wouldn’t be getting a good phone signal underground. And all things considered, this boy has it grand compared with, say, the average poor bugger buried alive in the days of Edgar Allen Poe who, unlike Mr Conroy, didn’t even have a few Xanax handy for when the anxiety of it all got too much.
And you’d be right. But still, this is very well constructed by screenwriter Chris Sparling and director Rodrigo Cortes and played with suitable intensity by Reynolds the only actor on screen for the duration. No flashbacks, no cutaways to his tormentors or would-be helpers. Just a man in a box with disembodied voices on the other end of a phone line. Which has brought up obvious comparisons with Phone Booth Colin Farrell in a vertical coffin for 80 minutes, though not entirely alone on screen. But Buried isn’t really in that league.
It’s very uncomfortable to watch at times, all the same and even with all the ridiculous cheating, it’s hard not to be moved and repulsed by the sight of an ordinary civilian supplying his terrorist captors with video phone footage of himself in his grave, pleading with his government for help, being used as a pawn in the big game.
Strong stuff and certainly not one for the claustrophobic.

Takers
DIRECTED BY: John Luessenhop
STARRING: Paul Walker, Chris Brown, Hayden Christensen, Matt Dillon
CERT: 12A

Someone out there clearly believes you can never have enough heist movies. Which is fair enough, so long as you have the decency to make one with some little shred of originality.
Takers wants to be Heat, with a little dash of all the other heist classics for added taste. But nobody told John Luessenhop that to pull off something like that, you really kinda need drama and a bit of sophistication and the odd light-hearted touch. It helps if you have a strong cast, as opposed to one fine actor dragging everyone else along while simultaneously choking on the script. Poor old Matt Dillon.
Dillon is a cop on the trail of a bank robbing gang Walker, Christensen, Brown, Michael Ealy and Idris Elba who do one job a year and then put their feet up in luxury. This cosy little arrangement is stirred up when a former member (TI, apparently some class of a rapper) gets out of prison and comes looking for his dues, hooking the crew into a major heist involving an armoured car and a $20 million payday.
Which should, at the very least, be an entertaining bog-standard thriller. Instead, and despite its pretensions, it settles for being a virtual remake of last year’s Armored except Matt Dillon is on the opposite side of the law this time. And someone decided that the missing ingredient in Armored was Hayden Christensen, though it’s immediately obvious he hasn’t taken any acting classes since George Lucas allowed him to ruin Darth Vader.
Can I go now?