‘BUYBUST’ HITS LIKE A GUT PUNCH — IN A GOOD WAY
The Philippine action film “BuyBust” has a plot that seems as predictable as sunrise. Two squads of Manila drug agents, looking to snag a vicious crime lord in an especially violent shantytown, get trapped in the tumbledown neighborhood of narrow streets and vengeful residents. The only way out is to fight their way out.
If that sounds similar to the plot of the 2011 Indonesian film “The Raid,” in which a cop has to fight his way out of a high-rise full of thugs, that’s probably not coincidental. The explosively entertaining “Raid” franchise has been extremely influential in the world of martial-arts movie mayhem.
But context is everything, and that’s where “BuyBust” offers a unique twist. Director Erik Matti has made no secret of his distaste for Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal war on drugs or his supporters. “BuyBust” is his bloody, bullet-riddled meditation on what he sees as the moral corrosion and corruption — of the police, government and citizens — that this war and its many extrajudicial murders have engendered.
Australian-born actress Anne Curtis is Nani Manigan, an agent who recently survived the slaughter of her previous squad and is wary when her new unit is tasked with going on a late-night raid in search of the elusive kingpin Biggie Chen (Arjo Atayde). Needless to say, things don’t go quite as planned, especially since not only do the cops have the criminals to deal with but also the area’s residents, weary of the death and the destruction that both the law and the lawless bring into their already impoverished lives.
Manigan realizes soon enough that she can only depend on herself and one of her fellow cops, Rico (MMA fighter Brandon Vera), and it’s kill or be killed by one of her own or someone else. “BuyBust,” entirely set over the course of one long, rainy night, then turns into a grueling story of survival, where everything — including pots, pans and even the neighborhood’s shaky electric grid — is turned into a weapon.
“BuyBust,” which sprawls over two hours, is too long and doesn’t have the sense of flow and pace of the best martial-arts action movies. Also, some of the fight choreography could have used refining. But the combination