Pondering Buried, you first think, This is the dumbest idea ever: a whole movie starring only Ryan Reynolds buried in a coffin in Iraq? Then you wonder, Nobody would try to make such a foolhardy stunt film unless they could pull it off, right? And now that Lionsgate has paid a reported $3.5 million for it, you’re surely thinking, it must be awesome, right? Wrong. Very Wrong. Hiss!
Apparently, burying his protagonist didn’t provide enough dramatic tension for director Rodrigo Cortes. As you might expect, there is the cell phone in the coffin, one with bad reception because it is several feet underground; desperate breathing and frenzied bugged-out eyes; and blackout darkness. But did you expect that the Reynolds character could start a fire inside his own wooden coffin? Or record a ransom video on the cell phone his captors left in the coffin? Still, you can almost deal with all of that — until you see the snake. A huge snake, actually. This guy’s buried under tons of dirt and somehow a giant-ass snake slips into his wooden coffin, Indiana Jones style — and then, because that’s not nearly enough, into his pants. After the midnight premiere, audiences debated how such an enormous snake could dig down through the dirt and through the cracks of his coffin. But we understood why it was there: Apparently, the over-the-top premise just wasn’t enough. They had to jump the snake.