‘BuyBust’ is a 2018 action flick from the Philippines starring Anne Curtis and Brandon Vera. I give a review, a 2-part history lesson, and a side-by-side comparison to ‘The Raid: Redemption’ and ‘Furie’ (2019) review: https://youtu.be/KAWBzvRQm5M
‘Buybust’ is a 2018 action flick from the Philippines. The thin plot follows an anti-drug task force as they try to take down a crime boss in a Manilla slum. I recently reviewed ‘Furie’ on this channel, a Vietnamese action flick attempting to serve as that country’s equivalent of ‘The Raid’, an action film that aspires to cross-cultural borders and open its home country’s film industry to the cinema world at large. Buybust is another such case.
It wasn’t anywhere near as much of a smash hit game-changing film as ‘The Raid’, but it did turn the equivalent of a 1.6 million USD budget into a 1.9 million return, and a decently sized audience abroad took interest in the project.
I’m a lover of foreign films, and I sometimes take a special interest in films from countries with somewhat underdeveloped film industries. If you look back to the 1970s, the Philippines was home to many grindhouse film shoots since American producers could shoot films there super cheaply, and pretty much guarantee a return on investment. It’s the reason why many exploitation films were shot abroad, it was cheap, and the locale seems exotic to American grindhouse audiences which adds instant production value.
So even though the Philippines were home to plenty of film productions, there hasn’t been much in terms of home-grown cinematic output that made the leap to viewers abroad. There has actually been a healthy internal film industry within the Philippines for decades. There were ebbs and flows, but there’s been a bit of a resurgence since the advent of digital filmmaking techniques. The National Film Academy of the Philippines was established in 2011 and the country’s cinematic output has been back on the rise in the years since. The cinematic history of the Philippines is interesting and certainly worth looking into if the subject appeals to you as well.
The Premise
The premise of ‘BuyBust’ is extremely similar to ‘The Raid: Redemption’ and follows pretty much the exact same trajectory. I mean seriously… a team of special forces officers head into a large location controlled by an elusive crime boss. They make their way stealthily through the enemy’s territory until shit goes sideways and they are attacked from all directions and unable to escape. The special forces agents fight back and fight for survival while still trying to catch the big-baddie that they went in for. The good guys seek help from innocent people who also happen to live in the same location. The team of good-guys is slowly whittled down until we begin to follow just one or two of the initial team members. Even the ending is the same, spoiler alert, our hero finally catches the crime boss, who is then killed by a crooked cop.
It’s pretty extreme and blatant how similar things are. It’s almost a remake honestly… almost. There are some thematic differences, but I don’t think it would be wrong to call ‘Buybust’ a bit of a ripoff.
The Characters
The characters are extraordinarily shallow. There’s not much in the way of character development, but Anne Curtis and Brandon Vera who end up boiling down to our two protagonists are both thoroughly likable. You can definitely root for their survival despite them each saying fewer words than the number of people they kill. Brandon Vera comes off as especially badass. They use his size well and he makes a great powerhouse. I bet he would make a top-notch bad guy in a kung-fu flick. Imagine this guy squaring off as the big bad final fight against someone like Donnie Yen, that I want to see.
Code-Switching
Something that I found rather distracting at the beginning of the film was the propensity to jump between languages mid-line. The characters switch constantly between English, Filipino, and Tagalog. Like they’ll start a sentence speaking Filipino, then switch to English for the second half, or vice-versa. It seemed chosen at random which language a particular line of dialogue was in. This piqued my interest so I did a little research, and maybe you’ll find it as interesting as I did.
I was curious if this frequent language jumping was an accurate replication of how real people speak in the Philippines and that seems to be the case. English and Filipino are both considered official languages of the Philippines and Filipino is sort of a level of Tagalog, if I’m understanding it correctly. I found out that jumping between languages mid-conversation is called “code-switching” and that this practice is especially common in the Philippines, as well it seems particularly with other countries that have imperialism in their history.
The sources I found say that Tagalog is spoken natively, but it’s English that is taught in schools and exclusively spoken in most colleges and private schools, so oftentimes Filipinos are more comfortable conversing on certain subject matters in English. So this code-switching is something that is instilled by the educational system in the Philippines and is accurate to everyday speech.
The Plot
The plot of ‘Buybust’ is extremely lacking in originality and the characters have nothing at all to them. Since the plot and characters are so far from the focus of this action-packed movie, their shortcomings could potentially be overlooked if the action was great… but… it isn’t.
Fighting Styles
One of the elements that I was most excited for going into Buybust was of course the fighting, but more specifically the fighting style. The Philippines has their own martial arts styles, and seeing a country’s native fighting styles is always something I’m intrigued by. Seeing some Tony Jaa bust out Muay Thai, or Lateef Crowder bust out Capoeira has an added level of excitement since it’s something that we haven’t already seen over and over again as an audience, it’s fresh and exciting.
I was looking forward to seeing the martial styles of the Philippines, namely Kali and all of its associated disciplines. Bladed Kali, also commonly known as Filipino knife fighting, is really cool fighting style in my eyes and makes for extremely dynamic and intense on screen action in my eyes, it’s the fighting style used for the excellent knife fights in The Hunted if you want a point of reference. I’ve actually studied Filipino knife fighting just a little bit a while ago for an action sequence I was choreographing. It’s a badass style.
Unfortunately, the choreography in Buybust is pretty basic. There are some cool moments, but for the most part, the fight scenes are a little lacking in complexity. They’re very work-man like, meaning they get the job done, but there aren’t many memorable combat exchanges and they’re unlikely to wow you. The choreography isn’t bad, just a little bland, but it’s made far worse through it’s execution.
The hand to hand combat is too shaky and often very darkly lit to the point where it’s hard to tell exactly what’s happening, especially in the early action sequences. There are strobing lights, rain, pitch black interiors, lightning-filled exteriors… all of which keep the action visually obscured, which you definitely don’t want in your action sequences. This is a very lame-Hollywood-action way of executing fight scenes.
The early action also involves multiple people all in separate skirmishes simultaneously. This means we’re jumping back and forth between the different encounters as they progress. With rock-solid editing, this wouldn’t be a problem, but the editing is not tight enough for this to avoid becoming messy and hard to track. It is easy to get lost in the action. This is something that could be helped by excellent sound work, but the sound work is unfortunately far worse than the visual presentation.
Sound
The sound is the weakest aspect of the film by far, and the main thing that really hurts it to a significant degree. There is a lot of foley missing in the fights. There are no fist-swing sounds to accompany the punches. Those whooshes are extremely important, and in Buybust, they’re just missing. The mixing is also quite poor, for the majority of the film really, but especially in the fight sequences and the dialogue. The gunplay sounds okay for the most part.
The bad fight foley makes the action feel really empty. When there are so many missing sound effects in these dark, shaky, obscured fight scenes, then there’s very little in terms of digestible action. You get the impression that there’s a fight going on, but you don’t pick up any of the specifics with this presentation.
The music is also terrible. I mean, not all of it to be fair, some of it decent, but the majority of the tracks are just awful. There’s this uber cheesy twangin’ mouth-harp song that they use three or four times that would sound more at home in a crappy 70s hillbilly comedy, and then there’s a big fight where the bust out the early 2000s straight to DVD horror movie butt-rock.
There also seems to be dialogue that is flat-out missing at times, which is a huge problem. I don’t know how that could’ve been overlooked. There are a couple of moments where character’s mouths are clearly moving, and there are even subtitles for their dialogue, but there’s no audio. We’re not talking about little ADR issues or anything like that, we’re talking about whole lines of dialogue that are just missing from the edit. Maybe the recordings got lost or corrupted, or maybe they just got inadvertently mixed so low that they became inaudible and they didn’t have the time or money to fix it, whatever the explanation, it’s awful. The audio side of this film is a complete mess. Films don’t often look this competent visually, while being so incompetent on an audio level.
Maybe the craziest thing, is that they actually started adding in a bit more foley in just the last third of the film. They actually started putting in some whooshes, but why the hell not throughout the rest of the film?! I mean even the late-stage foley that is there is still low-quality, and still lacking much of the necessary presence, but at least it’s there. Maybe the lack of foley was deadline or budget-driven, and they prioritized getting some more foley into the end of the movie action sequences while they still could. That’s as good a guess as I can come up with because its baffling that they would do this intentionally.
There’s a scene that arrives after a bunch of action, where the special forces people go sneak-mode again, and when they go quiet, they had all of the other audio drop out too, including the rain, even though it’s clearly still raining. They left in the thunder sounds and the sounds of their footsteps on the metal, but took the rain and ambience all the way out, It doesn’t make any sense.
It might be possible to save some of these visually messy fights through the sound design, but that obviously doesn’t happen here.
I wanted to like this film a whole lot more than I did. I would love to be able to champion this as a great action flick, but I can’t. I don’t think it’s a horrible film overall, so let me cover some things I did like.
Brutal Action
I liked the level of brutality in the action. Buybust is super violent, from the vicious stabbings, to the old man getting executed, to the girl getting smacked in the face with a cactus and then decapitated with a pair of garden sheers, the brutality is definitely noteworthy. My favorite brutal moment is definitely when massive Brandon Vera drops a whole-ass motorcycle onto a dude.
Side-note, the special forces good-guys have the best bullet-proof vests ever. They get shot and stabbed SO MANY TIMES and they just keep on going. There’s a part where one of them literally takes 3 head-on shotgun blasts to the chest, and he just keeps running forward, it hardly even slows him down… and this is after he’s already been shot and stabbed repeatedly… and after he was electrocuted! I mean yeah, he’s a big guy, but the amount of battering he takes approaches comical levels.
There are some interesting action setups, like a shootout between people on the roof and people inside the building, and a big brawl that ends with electrical wires falling into the knee-high water and zapping everyone.
When the action is clear, it can be quite enjoyable if you can get past the terrible sound design. This fight in the greenhouse type location is much better than any of the fights that preceded it. It’s in a brightly lit location, and we’re only following two protagonists at once, rather than jumping back and forth between five or six. Once the cast is whittled down to just these two, the action, in general, becomes easier to track and more enjoyable, but the audio problems persist.
Once the action gets started, it doesn’t really let up for any significant amount of time until the end. It keeps a good pace for the most part, aside from the first act set-up which could easily stand to lose a whole 15 to 20 minutes. This film does not need to be a full 2 hours. There’s a whole 15 minute segment at the beginning with no action, but also no plot or character development either. There’s very little happening for this stretch. I guess it’s supposed to be tense, but the sense of tension was not there for me, and it just felt like wasting time.
Ambition
There’s an extremely ambitious tracking shot action sequence that lasts for an incredibly long time. It’s still hurt by the bad sound work, but its impressive regardless and is easily the most clear action in the whole film since it doesn’t cut, and the camera remains steady throughout. The distance covered, number of people involved, and the coordination required all deserve adulation.
The level of ambition overall for this project is quite high and definitely admirable. There were reportedly over 300 stuntmen and over 1,200 extras.
The very ending, like the last 90 seconds or so before the track off to the credits, is totally fucking badass. Definitely ends the movie on a high-point.
Buybust is certainly disappointing, but it isn’t totally without merit. A re-edit of this film with a completely over-hauled sound design is something I would be interested in seeing.
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