Film Review: "Buba" (2022).

From the creators of How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) comes Buba. This German dark humor crime film directed by Arne Feldhusen and written by Sebastian Colley and Isaiah Michalski. When a small-town con artist joins the local mafia with his manipulative brother, his obsession with balancing his karma gets hilariously brutal.

The film stars Bjarne Mädel, Georg Friedrich, Anita Vulesica, Soma Pysall, Jasmin Shakeri, Michael Ostrowski, Michael Schertenleib, Maren Kroymann, Damian Hardung, Maximilian Mundt, and Danilo Kamperidis. We're not sure if Buba, the main character in the show is supposed to be a total creep or not. But seeing this man become a drug dealer will be an interesting watch. Mädel lives it up like the top dog and swagger into staggering performances. Deplorable, hysterical, phenomenal. The show spirals with sins and sizzles with exuberance. Mädel is a nuclear bomb as Buba, the actor basking in the ridiculousness of his surroundings and eclipsing them at every turn. Buba is in the wrong. That's for sure. But to walk away and not realize we're at least a little complicit, too, would be foolhardy.

The film depicts an intriguing and marvelously loathsome human beast in its natural setting, where the verdict on its judgment lies in the hands of its audience. The show doesn't want to be lovable. It just wants to remind you how excessive drugs can get and catch you being entertained by it. You can't target excessiveness to hate without being excessive in its depiction. In an all-too-familiar drug-dealing world, Kässbohrer offers an uncompromising portrait of the German drug-dealing industry hedonists' unscrupulous excesses. If this show doesn't shock you about how people abuse the system to get abundantly rich - I don't know what show will. The film is a bit long, but the performances are to die for from Mädel. So outrageous you would swear it wasn't real! It is! Kässbohrer, creator and writer of How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast), has written a marvelously comedic script, with howlingly funny bits of dialogue. When the show focuses on Buba and stays focus on it, it is at its best, taking viewers on an exhilarating ride. But, oddly, the biggest problem with this film about excess and over indulgence is that it feels too excessive. It is a good show but it's also polarizing. A viewer is either going to love it or hate it. The reason being not because the show itself is bad - it's an A+ effort on all fronts - but because the story is repulsive. It's funny. It has the ring of truthfulness and it has a keen awareness of pop-culture and nerd ephemera that helps both the characterizations and the gags. And it has perhaps more confidence now than it did before. A terrific watch, and bound to be one of the funniest films of the year, but perhaps a tad indulgent and lacking the emotional resonance that could've escalated it to truly unmissable status.

Simon says Buba receives: