Director: Josh Duhamel
Writer: Josh Duhamel, Bob Schwartz, Jude Weng (Screenplay)
Starring: Josh Duhamel, Dax Shepard, Olivia Munn, Kevin Dillon, Nick Swardson, James Roday Rodriguez
Plot: A group of friends reunite to play The Buddy Games, a wild assortment of absurd physical and mental challenges. In the process, they’ll heal old wounds, right past wrongs and figure out the true meaning of friendship…or die trying.
Runtime: 1 Hour 30 Minutes
There may be spoilers in the rest of the review
Story: Buddy Games starts as we see a group of friends, Bobfather (Duhamel), Shelly (Bakkedahl), Durfy (Shepard), Zane (Roday) and Bender (Swardson) who meet up and play a group of absurd physical and mental challenges, with Shelly always winning. After an incident, the friends go their separate ways.
Five-years-later Shelly needs help from his friends, with Bobfather needing to bring the friends back together for another version of their Buddy Games, hoping to heal old wounds.
Thoughts on Buddy Games
Thoughts – Buddy Games seems to be a film that wants to follow in the footsteps of ‘Tag’ with the core idea of a set of games being played between friends, only in this version the games are ridiculous, Juval in how they are designed, in fact they are beyond terrible to watch. The film loses all of the story merits as we could have seen here, by taking things too far with the pathetic games. The characters do have moments of good chemistry which will see them having a laugh between them, only the comedy, which is the most important part of this film, falls dramatically short.
Final Thoughts – Buddy Games misses the heart of the idea for the gross out comedy failures.
