BuyBust Review

Can this little known action movie be a hidden gem? Let’s find out!

The Scores

Interest: 8/10

Acting: 8/10

Storyline: 7.5/10

Intensity: 10/10

Fights Guns or Otherwise: 8/10

Nudity: 0/10

Director Score: 8/10

Musical Score: 6.5/10

Dialogue: 6/10

Logic In The Film: 8/10

BuyBust is a 2018 film. The film is two hours and seven minutes long. The genres are action and thriller. The three main stars are Anne Curtis (Known for A Secret Affair, No Other Woman, Baler, and In Your Eyes), Brandon Vera (Known for Kamandag, BuyBust, Magpakailanman, and The Black Eyed Peas: Bebot, Version 1), and Victor Neri (Known for A Short History of a Few Bad Things, TODA One I Love, Panday, and Fillipinas). The Director is Erik Matti (Known for On the Job, Honor Thy Father, Tiktik: The Aswang Chronicles, and BuyBust). A quick summary of the film is “A anti-drug law enforcement agency stages a gigantic drug bust in some slums.” Let’s take a closer look at those categories!

Interest: BuyBust, is an interesting film, it may be the truest action film I’ve possibly ever seen. It starts slow for the first 10 minutes, then after that all that happens is the three A’s: Action, Action, and Action. Seriously this film gives you the quick plot and idea of the film really quick, and then it just goes, action time! This really means that I was interested for the whole length of the film. If you aren’t really into action movies, or foreign films, you won’t like this film.

Acting: The acting of the film was a good experience. I was happily surprised by the actors and actresses doing well in character and making the movie come to life. Not to say that foreign films make me think less of the acting, but I was not expecting this level of craftsmanship to be brought in this film. It wasn’t Oscar worthy but it was good and fun.

Storyline: The storyline was seemingly at first very thin. Like I said, the movie drops 90% of the plot and Ideas behind it in the first ten minutes. But even with that, I liked the fact that the movie still slowly let out more information about the plot, some twists and turns that you probably did see coming, but the ending I wasn’t even expecting. I enjoyed it, even though it was probably still thin for most people’s standards.

Intensity: It’s intense all around. It is always intense, the fight scenes cause intensity, and you’re always wondering how the cops are going to get out of their predicament. This being said the film is very one sided on its intensity, and doesn’t turn anything like humor into intensity, it is just intense from action always.

Fights, Guns or Otherwise: Fights are bountiful. They come frequent, often and just happening constantly with bloodshed also plentiful from a variety of weapons and objects. The verbal razors aren’t as plentiful, but when they do happen, they do sting to the characters and it seems to matter. The problem is that they focus predominantly on the physical aspect of fights and not the emotional or mental trauma. Long term damage though (Like PTSD) doesn’t seem to be a thing that is referenced in the movie.

Nudity: There is no nudity in the film, which for the movie, is totally fine. I feel that nudity could help the film in some ways, but it would have made the movie feel scummy, and gross, which would have added to the story and back story of the film and story.

Director Score: Erik Matti seems to be a moderately competent director. The shots are done well, but nothing to risky, as well as I think he chose very good actors to portray the characters. I think the movie came to life for the most part. I’d gladly watch other movies from Erik Matti, While the film may be fairly one-dimensional, I think the one thing BuyBust is focused on is action, and it almost hyper focuses on the action.

Musical Score: The music in the movie is very overshadowed. I had to re-watch the film again, and read to see if it had any musical composers (it does). But the music is good, and isn’t out of place or overpowering. It does its job to give a mood, that you may not even notice that it exists, but is does do what it needs to, and that is very good.

Dialogue: The Dialogue, for being an action machismo murder fest, is actually pretty solid. Taking that it is such an action movie, this film is not going to have excellent dialogue, but the dialogue does enough to act as lubricant to move the film along, mostly information is conveyed for people to use, not necessarily someone having a nice chat with a friend kind of thing.

Logic in the Film: The film has decent logic, and I’d say most of us wouldn’t really say anything is too wrong. That is if you ignore body pressing a motorcycle over your head to throw on someone. While an awesome action moment, makes no sense at all and is probably not very realistic to most of us. But otherwise, the movie cared to some extent about bullet management, tend and care about wounds, physics mostly seem like they work on earth, so I’d say the logic is fairly solid.

So, did I like this movie? I did. Would I recommend this movie to someone? If they like action movies that don’t have too much thinking in them yes, or if you like a decent cop movie dealing with a drug slumlord and his small shanty town fighting a ton of cops. I really liked the film. It was fun, fairly mindless and just action packed. Not every movie that is good needs to be a thought-provoking film that’s in your face about it, and this film I think does a good job of that. All in all I give the film a 70/100, but that score is much lower than what the film actually is while watching it, and in all honesty, I’d say this is a Hidden Gem! Well, Until Next Time!