A film form nearly as old as the medium itself, the Western has by now been through more than a dozen different permutations spanning around the globe. A rough, incomplete chronology might trace the genre from its American early days to Mexico, Japan, Italy and then back, although this reductive narrative completely loses credence considering how much further afield it’s launched since its mid-century heyday. Whatever the route it’s followed, the genre definitively takes root in Indonesia with Buffalo Boys, a bit of martial-arts fusion which follows in the footsteps of 2017’s Marlina the Murderer, dubbed by some as the first “Satay Western.” Aiming more for populist theatrics than its predecessor’s arthouse verve, this film is a faithful tribute that draws inspiration from all over the world, it’s reinterpretation of scraps of The Seven Samurai, Butch Cassidy and others again demonstrating the genre’s utility as a free-form template for transposing contemporary political ideas.
Returning directly to the source, the movie starts off in the American West circa 1860, aboard a train trundling across the scrubby Californian desert. This isn’t the comfortable cross-country passage familiar from so many classic renderings, but a dusty cattle car packed with Asian men, likely the very workers responsible for constructing the railroad itself. This is an interesting, and much needed, shift in perspective, a distinct twist on the immigrant narrative which, for once, acknowledges the wide diversity of the Western ethnic landscape, where Asians, Latinos and African-Americans appeared in at least equal proportion to white settlers. Pitched as a crowd-pleasing entertainment, Buffalo Boys is of course less about correcting history than extending and translating mythic structures, skewing them toward the palates of a different audience. A contemplative opening thus segues into a scene seen often in the cinemas of Hong Kong and other formerly colonized locales, the scrappy underdog taking down the massive white man, his ingenuity and selective striking technique allowing him to fell the cocky, musclebound Goliath.
The brash fighter here is Jamar (Ario Bayu), accompanied in the New World by his charming brother Suho (Yoshi Sudarso), who collects the bets for his uneven bouts, and their uncle Arana (Tio Pakusadewo), who’s by now weary of this rootless life. A tragic death finally convinces Arana that it’s time to pack up and head home, a decision that lands the three men in the hothouse backwater of colonial Jakarta, from which they trek out further to their native Javan territory. We learn from a quick flashback that the three are exiles, a long-ago scuffle with treacherous Dutch overlords resulting in the death of the boys’ parents, along with that of Arana’s young wife.
Here Buffalo Boys changes locations but maintains its central conceit, the specter of tyranny at home allowing the three main characters to flex their status as de facto lawmen, righting wrongs and reconstituting a social order that’s fallen far out of whack. This adjustment comes courtesy of a gnarly mix of gunslinging, swordfighting and bone-shattering fisticuffs, the local Pencak Silat systems exercised in action that’s propulsively dispensed, if more hacked up and less satisfyingly fluid than that of The Raid. The core conflict, meanwhile, appears connected to modern reality in the country, where the global craze for palm oil has caused massive deforestation and sucked up space once reserved for domestic food crops. That situation is reflected here by the plight of a village on the brink of starvation, forced by the local strongman Van Trach (Reinout Bussemaker) to grow profitable opium instead.
Taking on the big boss and his waves of disposable minions, the trio uncovers some long-buried secrets while progressing through a narrative that hits all the expected genre beats. Along the way there are glorious sun-dappled vistas, humid landscapes starkly different from the usual arid overlooks and a fair amount of rapport between the charismatic leads. That nothing about Buffalo Boys is surprising is also part of the deal. Syncretic and expansive, it retains the genre’s essential moral message while broadening its reach, offering another chance for a once voiceless group to reflect their own stories back into the echo chamber of this perennial, familiar format.
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