Gimmicky thriller whose single gimmick, if you have not been tipped off beforehand, dawns on you with a mounting sensation of hopelessness and resignation. Ryan Reynolds, in a word, is to be the only human being to appear on screen for the duration, entombed underground in a wooden coffin in Iraq, with only a cellphone to connect him to the world above: sort of a Sorry, Wrong Number pushed to an extreme of confinement and claustrophobia. The overt political overtones prove to be no more than a convenience, a facile solution to the plausibility problem of what kind of person would bury another person alive. And rather than being pulled into the reality facing the character, we’re more apt to be pulled into the reality facing the filmmaker, the Spaniard Rodrigo Cortés. That is both the drawback of the movie and the draw. The pressing question is not so much how he, the character, is going to get out of it as how he, the filmmaker, is going to keep it going. For a movie contained in a crate, the camera is strikingly mobile, the space strikingly flexible: tracking shots and panning shots by the inch or by the foot, short sharp in-and-out zooms, a 360-degree rotating camera, Expressionist expansion and distortion of the box’s dimensions. The trick of the thing, the challenge of it, is to be not so strikingly mobile and strikingly flexible as to sacrifice the sense of confinement and claustrophobia, yet not so confined and claustrophobic as to sacrifice the sense of cinema. The stunt, in a level-headed and even-handed view, is sustained very well for the full hour and a half but never developed into more than a stunt. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd