“Buddy” key art.
Roadside Attractions
Buddy, a slasher horror comedy starring Cristin Milioti, Keegan-Michael Key, Topher Grace and Michael Shannon, is scaring up some raving reviews from critics.
Directed by Casper Kelly, Buddy opens in theaters nationwide on Friday. In the film, a giant orange unicorn named Buddy (voiced by Key) leads what seems like a happy, fun and educational TV show. Once one of the children refuses to play along with the stuffed character’s antics, things take a sinister turn as the children attempt to flee the show’s dimension they are trapped in.
Rated R, Buddy also stars Delaney Quinn and features the voices of Patton Oswalt and Eric Bauza (Coyote vs. Acme).
As of Friday morning, Buddy has earned an 87% “fresh” critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer based on 79 reviews, while the audience score is currently at 83% “fresh” on RT’s Popcornmeter based on 50-plus verified user ratings.
RT’s Critics Consensus and Audience Summary are still pending.
What Are Individual Critics Saying About ‘Buddy’?
Randy Myers of the San Jose Mercury News is among the top critics on RT who give Buddy a “fresh” score, writing, “The voice cast — Keegan-Michael Key freaked me out as Buddy — is almost too good, and the young cast is strong, too. The only bummer is that it doesn’t exactly stick the landing at the end, but everything else works.”
Tomris Laffly of RogerEbert is also impressed by Buddy, writing in her “fresh” RT review summary, “It’s a trippy, ballsy, and genuinely entertaining package that shouldn’t work at all. But it does, and I can’t believe it exists.”
Variety’s Owen Gleiberman lauds the director of Buddy, writing in his “fresh” RT review, writing, “Casper Kelly is a talent to watch. In Buddy, he’s essentially reviving an old joke and doing multiple variations on it. But he has a gleefully rich understanding of the inner insanity that can drive pop culture.”
Erik Piepenburg of the New York Times also deems Buddy “fresh” on RT, writing, “Look past some logical holes and desultory messages, and there’s a playfully twisted and unsparingly gory horror romp here that fans of Kelly’s 2014 viral short film, Too Many Cooks, a macabre sitcom sendup, will eat up.”
Nick Schager of The Daily Beast also praises Buddy, writing in his “fresh” take on RT, “A horror-comedy that takes a scalpel — or, more accurately, several weapons — to its jaunty protagonist, all while reveling in his darkly disturbed spirit.”
Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post also gives Buddy a “fresh” score, but he has some reservations about the film. Oleksinski writes in his RT review summary, “The first 20 minutes were side-splittingly funny and bitingly observed… Then a more ambitious story involving parents in the outside world, played by Cristin Milioti and Topher Grace, takes over, and the movie struggles to match its rocket-fuel kickoff.”
David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter is among the top critics on RT who give Buddy a “rotten” score, writing, “Genre audiences willing to settle for some weird-ass but ultimately toothless subversiveness might enjoy Buddy … But the movie is a one-joke premise, cute and colorful but unsatisfyingly fleshed out.”
Robert Daniels of RogerEbert also deems Buddy “rotten,” writing on RT that the film is “a delightfully bleak, but mostly missed opportunity.”
In his “rotten” review summary on RT, The Wrap’s Chase Hutchinson writes of the movie, “Each time you think you’re seeing the daylight of something potentially better to explore on the horizon, Buddy keeps dragging you back into the banal darkness. Like the kids, you deserve far better than whatever this lackluster production amounts to.”
Benjamin Lee of the Guardian isn’t a fan of Buddy, either, writing in his “rotten” review summary on RT, “With the poor child actors forced to stay in well-observed yet progressively grating Nickelodeon schtick, it’s hard to feel all that bothered about their survival.”
Buddy opens in theaters nationwide on Friday.
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