Detour

Despite doubling as a plausibility-straining endorsement for the battery life of Apple’s iPhone, Dickerson’s claustrophobic survival thriller proves itself a technically proficient, expertly paced affair.

At times the groan and scream of collapsing metal sounds so authentic you might mistake Jackson’s heavy breathing for your own.

The performance and filmmaking are invigorating.

Dickerson passes on the occasion for existential drama and goes for the race-against-the-clock urgency of an ordinary guy trying to crawl out of his predicament. It’s effective enough, but there isn’t much to it.

A moderately tense but also somewhat monotonous and overstretched exercise in claustrophobic suspense that doesn’t compare well to similar efforts like “Buried” and “127 Hours.”

In comparison to its superior predecessors, the film's redemption plot feels banal and slight.

For all the ways Dickerson vigorously dramatizes the stages of solitary confinement — nervous humor, fear, rages, survival ingenuity (including a nifty breathing apparatus) — it's never enough to explain why this particular individual's story is worth telling.