BuyBust

 BuyBust is a Philippine movie about a police squad caught behind enemy lines clearly modelled after The Raid. It's a pretty impressive attempt, with a great tone, decent budget and a bunch of cool ideas, but it does stumble pretty badly.

 It takes its time to get to the fireworks factory. We're introduced to the squad mid-training exercise, and it does a good job of establishing the more memorable members: Nina Manigan (Anne Curtis), a loner cop who plays by her own rules, Rico Yatco (mixed martial artist Brandon Vera), an affable mountain of muscle, and Bernie Lacson (Victor Neri,) the rookie leader who's trying to do right by his crew. They're all part of a PDEA squad, a sort of heavy militarized, very heavily armed anti-drugs team.

 They're going after local kingpin Biggie Chen (Arjo Atayde) with the help of turncoat small-time dealer Teban (Alex Calleja). They need to draw Chen out with a fake drug deal so they can bust him (hence the title.) But things get complicated when the meeting ends up taking place at a local Manila slum, a multi-tier shantytown run by criminals.

 So in the squad goes, split into two teams: one of them posing as muscle accompanying Teban and obviously corrupt cop De LaCruz (Lao Rodriguez,) the other in full tactical gear, shadowing them. It's a manifestly ridiculous, poorly-planned operation: Because they are in a heavily-populated, effectively hostile territory, the cops in full tactical armor keep having to effectively kidnap and restrain the people they run across while they try to keep up with their teammates.

 Yes, it's kind of silly, and it doesn't show the PDEA or their methods in a particularly good light, but it's an effective, very tense series of scenes because of course shit is going to hit the fan, but there are so many ways things could go wrong you don't know where the shit is going to come from.

 When chaos inevitably erupts, it does so in a particularly horrifying way. One of the squad gets publicly executed, and then an innocent bystander gets executed as well, in an attempt to draw out the police. This understandably riles up the local populace, and things erupt into a full-on riot, with multiple bands of both criminals and civilians hunting down the police.
 So that's the rest of the movie: police people need to escape the shantytown while everyone is out for their blood. A huge chunk of the film is the fireworks factory.

 Director Erik Matty chooses to go with a horror-adjacent tone, which is absolutely the right call because it helps distinguish his movie from The Raid a little, but it also makes the just-ok action much more exciting. My main issue with the movie is in the way it chose to portray rioting civilians as basically the undead in a zombie movie, and have action scenes where dozens of them are massacred with abandon.
 This is not a situation where the criminals call a bounty on someone or whatever, these people are rightly pissed with a shitty situation. It's a script choice that took away any sympathy I might have had for the police protagonists, even if they're justifiably defending themselves, because it's still done within an action framework where the fights are supposed to be exciting. It's meant as subversion, I think, but as that's the meat of the movie, and we're stuck with these folks as the protagonists, it feels ill-conceived.
 It gives the film a queasy shock factor to, say, stage a fight where one of the mooks is a middle aged matronly type in a headscarf, but it sure as hell isn't very satisfying when she gets stabbed in the face with a broken bottle. Making you queasy is the point, but the movie is so gung-ho about supporting its police troops that it plays like a standard action movie scene. Maybe the subtleties were lost on me, but especially given the politics of the movie, it reeks of not thinking the script through. 

 The script tries to have it both ways. It features a couple of scenes showing how bad the residents have it, and at one point Manigan gets attacked by a little kid with a hammer and she stops her non-lethally. This is treated as a big inflection point that will have CONSEQUENCES, but... whoop-di-do, lady, you didn't kill a child. It's particularly funny because on the previous scene she killed a dozen of the girl's neighbours without batting an eye.
 It gets a little preachy by the end in its condemnations on the violent drug wars enacted by the Philippine authoritarian government (probably for the benefit of thick-headed idiots like myself), but while I may sympathize with the content and recognize how it helps contextualize what came before, it comes as a bit of an infodump close to the end that doesn't really gel with the rest of the movie, especially its monsterification of the poor.

 Besides any conceptual issues, the movie has a huge problem in that the action is well staged but not particularly visceral. There's some variation between gunfights and hand-to-hand, and scuffles are frequent and very bloody, but everything feels a bit stilted and unnatural. This is understandable in the film's undeniable centerpiece, an extended one-take scene that weaves its way across, above and below the slums as Manigan fights her way through a bunch of angry civilians, but most other scenes adopt a very jittery editing style that robs most punches of their power; the horror tone clashing with the movie's more straightforward action leanings.

 A lot of things, not the least a shitload of enthusiasm, do a lot to elevate the action, so I feel like a bit of an asshole when I can't get over the conceptual problems. On the plus side,  the slums are gorgeously shot, and surprisingly colorful. The movie paints horrifying squalor in a sort of John-Wick chic, full of lurid colors and bright neon lights. There are a lot of interesting backdrops to the action, from multi-levelled improvised housing to indoor gardens to flooded alleys.
 The music is great, too; it's not cohesive, but the individual scoring for the scenes is a lot of fun.

 One of the cool thing about genre work (and one of the things that makes it disreputable) is that execution is almost everything. In action, in particular, plots can be recycled, tropes are accepted and even celebrated. Implausibility is waved away and characters and acting can be wooden; It's all part of the fun, as long as the fights are engaging.
 BuyBust doesn't necessarily succeed with its action - if nothing else, it's too drawn out, quantity over quality - but it is a honest, ambitious and enthusiastic attempt to make a homebrewn balls-out action film. Despite the lingering bad taste, I can't help but to like it.