Buffaloed

Very enjoyable acting is superb and story is mediocre. Zoey Duetch is so entertaining I absolutely love her style! Buffaloed is a bit stale, definitely starts well and slows down like others said. I like the way it was written and how wild it is!

The acting and story line here were great. A great cast and kept me laughing the whole time.

7.1

Enjoyed the acting; subject matter; spoofing of Buffalo. Started interesting, but about half way it just plateaued & felt too contrived. Central character never really developed a moral hook for me. The credits mentioned $13 trillion National Debt w/medical & student listed as most prevalent. Those numbers are for 2018, now the National Debt (mid 2020) is $25 trillion (and growing), and for consumer debt (movie listed 71 million people, but now 137 million). It's largely home payments followed by medical then student & car & credit card. Paying it all off (half is owned by foreign interests) is left to future generations courtesy of Trump (in part Covid necessary; in part tax breaks for wealthy; in part for re-election).

Yet another low-budget quirky project in which Deutch is not only the best thing in the movie, but is invariably the only thing worth watching in the movie. The key is Brian Sacca's script which starts off cleverly and genuinely builds interest, then about halfway through crashes and burns horribly. The irony of a Canadian production company pretending to honor Buffalo is best left for Guinness to consider. as an award category

'Buffaloed' is basically 'The Wolf of Wall Street' minus everything that made that movie great. Now that might sound harsh, so it is important to remember that 'The Wolf of Wall Street' was one of the finest movies made last decade. Almost any film that finds itself being compared to it is going to come up well short. That being said, this film did have some noticeable flaws that desperately needed to be addressed.

I'm a big fan of Zoey Deutch. In fact she was probably the only thing that actually got me over the line towards seeing this movie. I've liked her in pretty everything she's been in. The problem is that she isn't quite a strong enough actress yet to carry a film all by herself. She did an adequate job in 'Before I Fall' but that also had a really strong story for her to fall back on and didn't require her acting to be at its absolute peak. 'Buffaloed' on the other did require that. She is actually given a lot to work with here. The script lets her roam free and gives her some incredibly energetic dialogue to utilise. They were basically trying to make her the female version of Jordan Belfort and match Leonardo DiCaprio's performance. A dream role for a lot of actresses, but certainly not an easy one to nail.

The film also has a lot of trouble deciding exactly what genre it wanted to fall into. Some scenes feel like they are trying to be an out and out comedy, while others feel like it is trying to take itself very seriously. The problem is that neither of these are done very well. I don't think I laughed once through the run time, but I also never took the story seriously enough to actually care about what was going to happen next.

All that said, the film is far from unwatchable. The concept is mildly interesting when you stop poking holes in it and just accept it for what it is. They also did a very good job of making Jai Courtney's character particularly evil and ensuring the audience cared about his fate. That was probably the strongest aspect of the film come to think of it. Still though, it isn't enough to save what was a pretty forgettable experience and not one I would recommend spending your hard earned on.