Buried (2010)

  I don't know what any of those people are talking about.  I can only assume the blurbs are taken out of context.

Imagine if you woke up inside a coffin buried in the desert and your day only went downhill from there.  That is what happens to Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds), a contracted truck driver in Iraq.  His convoy is ambushed, he blacks out, and wakes up in a box with only a lighter, a flask, and a cell phone.  It's not his cell phone, it's his captor's.  The man (Jose Luis Garcia-Perez) tells him that unless the U.S. pays a ransom of $5 million, Paul will be left to die.  He frantically calls everyone he can think of, from the FBI to the State Department to his estranged wife, only to find that being buried in a coffin in a foreign country pretty much guarantees that you're on your own. 

The thing about a personal hell is just that:  it's personal. Unless the main character is empathetic, everybody watching is just going to be bored.  Reynolds is not a bad actor, but his character is not exceptional in any way.  Frankly, he is a slacker who is waiting around for someone else to save him instead of taking the initiative and using the tools at hand to save himself.  If Uma Thurman can finger-punch her way out of a coffin buried in dirt without breaking suspension of disbelief in Kill Bill vol 2, this guy could have gotten out of a coffin buried two feet in sand with a BlackBerry.  It almost verged into a black comedy in the last half hour.  I don't know if that was the intention.  If it was, this is probably genius.  If not, it's kind of awful.