91
The Playlist by Bradley Warren
The world of the film is bracingly immediate and constantly overflowing—dubious sound design or a shift in image quality, while glaring, can’t puncture the holistic nightmare of Matti’s vision.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
The Hollywood Reporter by Clarence Tsui
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.
50
The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak
Add a surprisingly talkie ending that tries to walk back the no-holds-barred bloodshed for the revelation of a secret I honestly didn’t care about anymore and I found myself fatigued rather than excited.
80
The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis
Wrapping a political-corruption yarn in a blanket of bullets and blood, the Filipino director and co-writer, Erik Matti, slides visual and textual jokes into the mayhem in ways both sly and blatant.
90
Screen International by John Berra
As much as BuyBust seems to be engineered for maximum excitement, it’s not without the complexities that are typical of Matti’s ambitious genre pieces.
50
Though the film becomes a slog, it has a saving grace in Curtis and Vera’s performances, which serve as neat complements to each other in temperament as well as fighting styles.
70
Los Angeles Times by Katie Walsh
In the cynical worldview of BuyBust, there’s no escaping this crushing cycle of killing and corruption. That real-life message makes this wild action film more powerful, but the violence is a hard pill to swallow.
90
BuyBust is a superbly executed action film about drug squad members fighting for their lives in a maze-like Manila slum that resembles nothing less than hell on earth.
63
BuyBust is brimming with life, furiously protected and furiously taken, a bracing introduction of Matti and Filipino cinema to the world.
38
RogerEbert.com by Simon Abrams
So often bogged down by pseudo-naturalistic long takes and generic cop/robber power dynamics that it makes one wonder what the point of watching such a film is.