Review of Buster

Introduction

Cheeky-chappie-Cockney-chancer Buster Edwards (Phil Collins) scrimps by on two-bit scams and his wife (Julie Walters) June’s eternally patient, hopelessly naïve adoration. When the job of a lifetime comes along, Buster can’t resist but take a share, and finds himself involved in what is, effectively, the Great Train Robbery of 1963. Scooping over a million pounds and humiliating the already Profumo-scarred Conservative government, Buster and his cohorts find themselves pursued relentlessly by the law, eventually forcing Buster and his family to flee the country and into the loving arms of la dolce vita in Acapulco. Once there however, Buster and June find their relationship shattering under the pressure of financial infirmity and cultural insolvency. When June decides to leave, Buster is forced to either accept his isolation in Mexico, or return to his beloved family and face certain imprisonment.

Video

Awful. It starts with a weird ratio that won’t please anyone, follows through with terrible definition, inconsistent colours, artifacts, compression and even weird stripes of blur over the entire duration of the transfer. Basically, it looks like a bad VCD…

Audio

… and it sounds like one too. Dialogue is too low, and music is far too loud. And yes, speaking about that music, it’s so imaginative that when Buster’s plane lands in Acapulco, the needle-drop is, believe it or not, ‘Goin’ Loco Down in Acapulco’ by The Four Tops.

Features

Nothing.

Conclusion

I suppose you could say it could have been worse: Collins is a screen charisma vacuum as one might have anticipated, but he’s not quite as annoying as his hideous, nasal ballads seem to insist. Equally surprisingly, Julie Walter’s pixie-ish innocence only grates in large doses and there’s a nice social-realist aesthetic to balance the couple’s rose-tinted meanderings. The tone is interesting too, as ‘Buster’ could scarcely glorify its criminal element more: a strictly non-violent sect of mild-mannered crims, who just want to live the rowdy, tasteless, decadent life of spoiled, tactless Imperialists abroad; yet the troubled Conservative government is portrayed as a gaggle of ‘hang ‘em all’ zealots who say things like “perhaps that’s what we should do to our criminals, five years in public school”. So preoccupied with their own sexual peccadilloes to cultivate any perspective on what we can only assume is a theft so innocent and innocuous to be barely considered a crime. Yet ‘Buster’ is no proletarian howl against inequality, it’s a cluttered, lighthearted fiasco that never gives itself a chance to make an impact.

In a sense, ‘Buster’ the movie is a lot like Buster the crook: flaky, hapless, dreamy, indecisive, naively romantic, commitment-phobic and almost entirely without substance. The central romance, between Buster and June is too skeletal to evoke any genuine human emotion, let alone the life-fulfilling love it claims to encapsulate. Indeed, with all its snappy pacing, ‘Buster’ remains dramatically anorexic, its narrative a rapid-fire construction of concussive romantic ricochets so underdeveloped that the film starts to resemble the extended prologue to the inevitable Phil Collins music video. Indeed, ‘Buster’ is so schematic and clipped, it’s as if the filmmakers want to get it over and done with as quickly as the viewer.