Our Highest Rec: Ryan Reynolds Proves He’s a Good Actor in Buried

Our Highest Rec is when the staff proposes something they find underappreciated, undervalued, or underrated. It's an excuse for us to push our opinions on you.

There are three essential things you need to know about Buried going into the experience. Two of those things are going to seem pretty cool, and one of those things is going to seem pretty not cool. You’ll know which is which when you read them:

1. Buried is about a guy who wakes up to discover he’s been shuttered in a coffin, ten feet underground, with nothing but a weak cell signal and a Zippo lighter at hand.
2. For the entire movie, the audience stays with the guy inside the coffin as he tries to figure out how to escape his predicament.
3. The man in the coffin is Ryan Reynolds. He’s the only actor who appears onscreen in Buried. He’s thus in every single scene—if not every single shot—of the movie.

You might already be out on seeing Buried ever in your life. That’s understandable, because an examination of Ryan Reynolds’ resume doesn’t give us much reason to trust his ability to carry a movie, let alone a movie in which we’re physically trapped in his company for 90 minutes. Buried sounds like something Shia LaBeouf would do in the Weird Performance Art stage of his career; it reads like a sick joke. But—and this is literally going to sound unbelievable—Buried is a fantastic movie. Ryan Reynolds crushes it. With one performance he proves once and for all that, try as he might to deny it, he’s a terrifically talented actor. It throws a strange light over his entire body of work, and it throws a whole slate of what-ifs on the table. How can Ryan Reynolds be this good, but still be so bad?

Before we give Ryan his due diligence, it must be said: Buried is worth seeing on sheer premise alone. To say it’s a movie in a box is exactly zero exaggeration. There are no flashbacks, cutaways, meanwhiles, or exteriors—we’re stuck underground the entire time, and while that might seem like a narrative restriction, the movie rises to the challenge with gusto. A coffin this hazardous has never been so well-made. Conflict lies in every lighter-lit corner, and there are enough surprises in this tiny space to rival the bag of Mary Poppins. Buried is crushingly relentless, completely unique, and Ryan “Kiss My Van-Wilder Ass” Reynolds carries it from start to finish.

Ryan’s performance in Buried is the best and worst thing about the movie. Without his charisma and dynamism and intrigue, it all falls apart. But thanks to his charisma, dynamism, and intrigue, Buried is awesome, and you’re going to walk away from Buried wanting the same thing from every other Ryan Reynolds movie, even though Ryan Reynolds clearly has no interest in making anything as good as Buried again. Your expectations are going to be so high and so unmet that you’re going to end up hating Buried for even letting on that Ryan was good in the first place. It was fun to hate on Bad Actor Ryan Reynolds. The world was simpler. Knowing you live in a world with Good Actor Who DGAF Ryan Reynolds is complicated and uncertain and disappointing. Ryan Reynolds shouldn’t hold that kind of power. It stinks going through life every day knowing that Ryan played you like that. Recovery isn’t easy.

It’s still worth wondering why Ryan Reynolds chose the career he did, because it’s clear from Buried that his career was a choice. The relevant Ryan Reynolds timeline begins with National Lampoon’s Van Wilder in 2002 and goes up to Deadpool earlier in 2016. Most of that stretch is really bad, but there are also tiny nuggets, like Adventureland and the less annoying parts of Deadpool, that supplement Buried’s mack-daddy gold-star performance as highlights in Ryan’s career. The guy can make solid choices and has become known since Deadpool for defending his particular passion projects, but that makes it all the more remarkable how little he has done either of those things. He’s the epitome of a guy who appears outwardly to grab the easy money and kick back. He’s not about to start directing and he’s not about to veer off into melodramatic two-handers with Blake Lively; he’s just gonna show up and chew his lines with his mouth open and look real hot doing it.

Ten years from now, if we’re still blessed with Ryan Reynolds’ presence in Hollywood, his career might very well be one of the bigger what-ifs of this time in movies. Buried proves that when the guy doesn’t phone it in, he can really bust his chops and carry a picture. Deadpool, and the years-long crusade Ryan spearheaded to have it made, proves that when the guy is passionate about something, he makes it happen. There’s the skill and motivation here of a truly special actor, but the record shows that our boy doesn’t really want that. He’ll wear a mask when he feels like it and turn on the charm when appropriate, but otherwise, he’s gonna take his check and put his feet up.

Ryan Reynolds seems to love being Good Actor Who DGAF Ryan Reynolds. He’s comfortable in that position. He doesn’t care what we think. The public can mock his sinking reputation; we can shake our heads at another cocky SOB digging his own grave, but Ryan’s been underground before. He excelled there. In fact, that’s where he made the best movie of his career. We think we’re watching a crash-and-burn, but Ryan’s had a hand on the wheel this whole time. Meanwhile, the other hand’s out the window, and it’s giving us the finger.