Philippine audiences will be drawn by the transformation of matinee idol Anne Curtis into a brutal killing machine. It’s likely to captivate audiences on its home turf more than on foreign shores, however, where it will probably be marketed as a niche title for aficionados of hard-knuckled action-thrillers - among its stars, after all, is the U.S.-born mixed martial arts fighter Brandon Vera. Making its world premiere as the closing film of the New York Asian Film Festival, BuyBust is bound to raise a ruckus when it opens in the Philippines on August 1, followed by its U.S. Taking no prisoners in the film’s sweeping critique of the social malaise eating at his country, he has intensified his crusade against the Philippines’ slide toward mob rule, a scenario he brought to the screen in his more allegorical Honor Thy Father (2015) and Seclusion (2016).
Matti is probably making a point by depicting the masses as a loony army, given the way he described those who voted for Duterte as “motherf-s” on Twitter last year. Here, nobody gets out of the mess alive with their moral compass untarnished. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead, as his protagonists battle with crazed, zombie-like mobs while they try to navigate their way to ultimate survival. These visceral representations of death and destruction aside, Matti’s stylistic and thematic frame of reference seems to be George A.
Revolving around an elite squad’s attempt to escape from a slum after a botched operation, BuyBust boasts a body count that’s so ever-spiraling it could make Quentin Tarantino quiver, and enough bone-crunching brawls to outstrip those of the no-holds-barred Indonesian actioner The Raid. The veteran Philippine genre-meister’s ultraviolent action blockbuster goes beyond easy moral binaries to highlight how Duterte’s warped worldview has made monsters out of everyone from the police to the peddlers to the ordinary people in between, all of them doing the bloody bidding of a corrupt political class. But director Erik Matti is no cheerleader for populist president Rodrigo Duterte and his advocacy of extrajudicial violence. Among the recent batch of Philippine movies about the Southeast Asian country’s so-called war on drugs, BuyBust is a rare beast: It actually invites the viewer to root for cops who shoot, stab, pummel and behead people in a poverty-stricken shantytown.
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