Buster's Mal Heart

It’s science fiction that’s complex, thoughtful and funny, like 12 Monkeys or Primer run through a Fargo filter.

Malek’s talents serve a much more personal, ultimately touching story.

An unusual movie like Buster’s Mal Heart demands an unusual star, and Rami Malek proves an ideal fit for Sarah Adina Smith’s sophomore feature.

Buster’s Mal Heart is indie sci-fi at its most abstract, taking elements of more populist, influential films like "Fight Club" and "The Matrix" and filtering them through philosophical exchanges and coolly stylized compositions to produce something that’s somehow simultaneously more weighty and more slight.

Smith’s ambitious film at times resembles “Badlands” (1973) crossed with “Fight Club” (1999) as directed by the Coen brothers. Mostly, though, it founders in the complications of its own excess of themes, interconnected story-lines, and multiple personality disorders sketchily connected by an anti-establishment point of view.

Writer-director Sarah Adina Smith's film confuses narrative gimmickry for the sensitive evocation of an inner life.

Despite a committed lead performance and flashes of finding beauty in the bizarre, Buster’s Mal Heart loses confidence as it proceeds, resulting in a journey of half-formed ideas that could’ve used as much focus as Malek’s dead-eyed glance.

I appreciated what Smith was trying to do with this movie, and it is overall successful, even though it doesn't connect every dot. Rami Malek does a fabulous job, but is not the boldest choice of lead, given the material. This movie probably won't surprise you, but it might engage you and leave you feeling the good kind of confused.

In 'Buster's Mal Heart,' Rami Malek carried the film as far as anyone could reasonably expect. But in the end, it feels like writer/director Sarah Adina Smith had all the right ingredients to make a great dish, but it just wasn’t cooked right.

Buster’s Mal Heart is a film that presents impressive imbalances. It's ambitious but at the same time quite scattered. Conceptual but confusing. Interesting but not really entertaining. It offers a good performance by Rami Malek but his surroundings always feel emotionally distant. Nothing feels connected the way I think it should've been and for that reason I couldn't enjoy it. It was trying to reach for more that it could grab and failed. Because as is obviously well known, everything in excess is bad.

This movie is not for everyone. And probably not for me either. I am even having hard time to define its genre. Something between a mystery, thriller and mind game experience with an allusion to "Jonah and the whale" biblical story. While the movie is done quite masterfully (including directing, acting, and cinematography), the main idea was unclear to me. Was it that a man feels boxed and not free? And that some kind of transformation is required to free himself? While I did enjoy watching most of the movie, the overall lasting impression was far from great. That presents some kind of a challenge to rate it. Professionally the movie deserves at least 8 but my overall score would be no more than 5. It is very subjective, of course.

He wasn't designed to fit in with the system! This is one of those films, you won't properly get the notion. Too random, surreal, but at the end somehow all connects. The narration has multiple layers, that's what confusing at the initial stage. Though I liked the character nicknamed, 'the last free man'. If I had watched this film successfully means, that's the main reason. But I felt they have under-used it or missed a great opportunity. Because it was a wonderful film character. Tens of stories can be created using such role. But why did they go for a dry story. In my opinion, it should have been in the line of 'Captain Fantastic'. Rami was okay. He did justify the role he had played. But not like a performance of the year. I understand why this film was very dark, and partially being a dark comedy. The overall storyline looked good. The man with ambition, and to meet that end, he had dedicated his life. But he did not know what he's becoming. It was like 'Split' meets 'Bad Santa'. From all, the boat scenes were a bit of out of context. Yet it brought distinct perspective to the character who was struggling with reality. A film for a few selected people. I feel bad for rating it such low, but I'm only being honest. 3/10