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Buffalo Boys is, in essence, an Indonesian hybrid action movie that consists of two disjointed films a brutal martial arts movie and a shocking reimagined western. Set somewhere in the mid-1860s, ancient Indonesian brothers, Jamar and Suwo, who are portrayed by Ario Bayu and Yoshi Sudarso respectively, come back to Java and seek revenge for the murder of their father, the benevolent Sultan Hamza. The plot in and around Buffalo Boys is self-explanatory and does not require any further elaboration, but as the title crawl suggests there is more to it. Simply put, accounts of suppression, brutality, and tragedy are stories for folklore, and one of the many tales where fiction meets the truth. That over-delivers what writer and director Mike Wiluan and co-writer Raymond Lee were able to accomplish. While Lee and Wiluan tried to take the folk tale beyond shock and awe, which did work to some extent, Buffalo Boys had everything seemingly the way it was meant to be, which was simple yet elegant.
In the case of Buffalo Boys, we find Wiluan and Lee struggling from the sequence of the movie and instead relying on the plot. To illustrate the point, Jamar and Suwo are siblings that exist in a realm beyond reality, that is, in action films.
They possess a moral code, which is apparent when they return to Java and spend half of their time picking which villains to fight. They are also young and reckless, like when they help their kind-hearted uncle Arana (Tio Pakusadewo) operate on and teach him bare-hand fighting competitions on a secret train in California. The women especially want to be with Jamar and Suwo, who appreciate the brothers laughing after they unknowingly take a bath in a famous freshwater spring. And men want to be like Jamar and Suwo, the surnames of the slimy highway robber and the political schemer, Fakar (Alex Abbad) may not tell the brothers “You and me, we’re not so different” but he can say it without actually saying it.
While I do not fully agree, the disposition makes a valid point that prior to watching the movie, the film does give audiences disconcerting foreshadowing hints. Most male figures good or bad seem to dispatch or be dispatched in a fair amount of gore and thunderous sound effects, while most females are verbally or physically assaulted. One of the women is even whipped and bled from her back. Some parts of this are, for lack of a better term, not very easy to understand. One term that may define this is in a Game of Thrones fashion, where an important character meets their demise at the end and the start of the next book or season. For me, it does matter since all these parts, or what I believe to be a collective, have been blurred together in a way that everything appears to be rushed. For me, the imagery gravitating around Buffalo Boys is compelling, but the film does not do justice to it. I wish the imagery had not appeared so disjointed from the remaining pieces.
Best of all, the action sequences were enhanced by the incorporation of rhythmic and dynamic sound editing which gave the fights an additional level of intensity. The worst criticism I can provide for these action scenes, that are exactly the reason why you should watch Buffalo Boys, is that there are not many of them. The first fight, which of course takes place on a train, is arguably the best scene in the film.
Luckily, there are quite a few other well-designed scenes in Buffalo Boys, including the gaudy climax in which the film’s major fight takes place. Such scenes feel overly sparse in my opinion, and merit little more than an extremely cautious suggestion. It isn’t quite what could have been, but Buffalo Boys is at times good enough for any of those watching it.
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