Review: Buddy Games

Josh Duhamel and his supposedly adult dude-bro pals (Dan Bakkedahl, Nick Swardson, Kevin Dillon, James Roday Rodriguez, and Dax Shepard) compete in an annual series of frat boy-derived obstacle courses. One year the obnoxious Dan Bakkedahl (a frequent winner of the games) gets particularly painful to endure with his grotesque victory celebrations. It pisses off both Nick Swardson as well as Bakkedahl’s wife enough that the latter takes a paintball gun and shoots the jerk in the testicles while he’s ‘tea-bagging’ a fellow competitor. Swardson takes the blame to protect his repulsive friend’s marriage. Cut to five years later and Duhamel is told by Bakkedahl’s mother that he is suicidally depressed and the only thing that might cure him is to have another Buddy Games. Duhamel reluctantly agrees to get the gang back together, minus Swardson at Bakkedahl’s request. Naturally Swardson finds out and turns up anyway. Let the games begin! Olivia Munn plays Duhamel’s disapproving wife.

 

Is this really all Josh Duhamel wanted for his directorial debut? A fourth-rate, dude-bro ‘comedy’? Star-director Duhamel and his co-writers Bob Schwartz (a debutant) and Jude Weng (a TV director/producer) give us one of the worst films of its type. Worse than any of the “Hangover” films, “Old School”, “Grown Ups”, etc. Just how bad is it? The crowning achievement here is a scene where the guys have to pick women up before shitting themselves. That was actually funny in a very low-brow way, but think about what that means for the rest of the film. The only other real laugh here comes from a genuinely funny cameo by Jensen Ackles as Dax Shepard’s construction worker brother. Otherwise this is gross dude-bro bullshit and mostly painfully unfunny, with co-star Dan Bakkedahl only a testicle hair less obnoxious than “The Hangover” creep Zach Galifianakis. The characters are either repugnant or boring, with the talented Kevin Dillon far above this kind of shit, surely.

 

A WWE Studios film (hence the Sheamus cameo) Duhamel and co have given us testicle jokes and frat boy humiliation games, basically a lame and gross version of the underrated “Tag”. If this is the story Duhamel believed in enough to co-write, direct, and star in and this is what he wanted to bring to the world…it’s very telling. Too telling. I hate to be a killjoy over something clearly intended to be simple silly fun, but I couldn’t help thinking about all the money being bet on these games plus how much the obstacles themselves probably cost…what a waste of money on such frat boy bullshit.

 

Obnoxious, crude dude-bro hijinks comedy with laughs present but in the shortest supply imaginable. Low effort all round, extremely low results. And what a waste of Olivia Munn, basically fulfilling the same function as an Adam Sandler love interest: Ego feeding.

 

Rating: D

 

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