Buddy Games
Written by Josh Duhamel, Bobby Schwartz and Jude Weng
Directed by Josh Duhamel
Starring Olivia Munn, Josh Duhamel, James Roday Rodriguez, Elysia Rotaru and Dax Shepard
Running time: 1 hour and 30 minutes
MPAA rating: R for strong crude sexual content and language throughout, some graphic nudity, drug use and brief violence
by Nikk Nelson
At least ninety percent of my decision whether or not to review a film for Moviejawn comes from the movie poster. If I see someone I like, I say yes. I don’t watch the trailer or even read a plot synopsis. I just dive in. It’s only gotten me into trouble a few times, the most recent being Josh Duhamel’s directorial debut, Buddy Games (2019). Duhamel also co-wrote and stars. At a glance, what I saw was Saban/WWE films trying to get into the slapstick gross-out Happy Madison Productions game, complete with Nick Swardson co-starring. A quick note about the cast. The face on the poster that immediately made me say yes to reviewing this was James Roday Rodriguez. Psych is one of my favorite TV series of all time and I think he is immensely talented. He’s someone I root for in life and in their career. As the film opened, I realized the cast was stacked with people I root for, including Swardson. Dax Shepard. Olivia Munn. Kevin Dillon. Dan Bakkedahl—who was amazing in the FX series Legit and just about everything else I’ve ever seen him in. I held my breath. I wanted this movie to be good so bad. But then when the inciting incident was a character losing his balls in a tragic paintball/rubbing his scrotum on a passed-out friend’s face accident, I lost all hope.
Now, before I get accused of being a prude or quick to shit on anything like this, I just want to go on record and say Grandma’s Boy (2006) is one of my favorite movies. I re-watch it constantly, especially if I’m home sick. It’s medicinal. Just last night, I re-watched Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) and laughed my ass off. And, finally, I think I was the only Jawn staff member who liked and defended Hubie Halloween (2020). So, there. That being said, Buddy Games falls into every single Happy Madison shortfall with very few exceptions. Literally everything you expect to be here is here and you’ve seen it a million times before. Semen drinking? Check. But they did it better in Van Wilder (2002). Swardson in a dirty, sweaty sex scene with an older woman? Check. Callback to Grandma’s Boy. A seemingly cute wild animal all of a sudden cartoonishly mauling someone? Check. Pioneered in There’s Something About Mary (1998), perfected by Steve Zahn in Saving Silverman (2001), and jumped the shark in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Had Buddy Games been made in 1998, it might have been original. Or, at least, the humor would have been.
The script and story itself are hopelessly lost. Case in point, the film’s name, Buddy Games. What are the Buddy Games? It’s never explained. What are the events? An obstacle course, this time. Is it not always that? We’re not sure. Sometimes, it’s drinking a bunch of laxative at a club and trying to seduce a lady before you shit yourself—again, pioneered in Dumb and Dumber (1994) and something even Van Wilder did better. How are points tallied? Go fuck yourself. I’m not exaggerating. They never explain how points are calculated. There’s even a couple of moments where an animated scoreboard crawls across the screen but it’s there for only a split-second, I think perhaps because they realized in post-production that they forgot to film a scene where the games were at all explained and so a scoreboard means absolutely nothing to the audience. I was, at first, absolutely heartbroken to see Olivia Munn playing ‘the girlfriend’ in this cesspool of immature, toxic masculinity. I was convinced that this role was somehow her penance for speaking out against sexual harassment and assault, in general, and specifically, on film sets.
Luckily, the film ends with a great twist for her character and for the story itself that I don’t want to spoil. If you want to see it, you have to suffer through the other eighty-five minutes just like I did. I thought it was worth it because I love Olivia Munn. Someone please get her a Charlize Theron in Monster (2003) or Nicole Kidman in Destroyer (2018) role ASAP. Olivia Munn is more than talented enough to do it and she deserves to be taken seriously. Ultimately for Buddy Games, either despite its best efforts or because it’s genuinely trying to work in some subliminal messaging for what they know is a heavily incel audience, it does pitch the idea that, symbolically, men need to lose their “balls” in order to grow up, be more sensitive, and operate in a post-patriarchal world. There’s enough going on there, along with the cast, that I couldn’t totally hate it. But I definitely won’t be revisiting it.
Watch This Not That, Buddy Games Edition:
Josh Duhamel: Scenic Route (2013)—co-starring another actor who I think is criminally underrated, Dan Fogler.
Dax Shepard: Chips (2017)—I ended up really liking this one. He and Michal Peña have great chemistry.
James Roday: Gravy (2015)—which Roday also wrote and directed.
Buddy Game is available to watch on demand, digital and DVD November 24.
Read more from Nikk Nelson in the pages of the Fall 2020 print issue of Moviejawn, click here to buy.