Metacritic reviews

What Buffalo Boys lacks in originality it makes up for in spirit. There’s a verve in Wiluan’s direction, a sense of joy shaping his approach to the tried and true familial vengeance hook.

Buffalo Boys isn’t terribly concerned with sweeping vistas or slow-burn character development. Its primary function is simply to entertain, which in practical action-movie terms means lots of brawling and lots of blood.

For the most part, Buffalo Boys is a decent folk tale, despite Lee and Wiluan's periodic application of "Game of Thrones"-style sensationalism.

All in all, this Eastern western is a jovial genre cocktail, but it’ll be more interesting to see if its director can bring greater nuance to whatever his next project turns out to be.

Leveraging highly polished production values evoking the Old West with detailed sets, authentic weapons and period costumes, Wiluan gets enough of the details right so that the genre’s typical characteristics blend fairly seamlessly with the Indonesian adventure yarn.

Buffalo Boys is a messy, interesting, fun romp in cross-cultural interplay.

Buffalo Boys is rather tedious going in between the fights, and those action beats are spaced too far apart.

This is a film that often feels more assembled than directed, crucially lacking the sheer verve that would enable it to transcend the influences that it proudly wears on its dusty sleeve.

The fights are leaden, so when a movie’s bid for historical verisimilitude has already stopped at backlot-acceptable, and the character development is constrained by dumb dialogue, such meager tending-to of an Asian action flick’s primary draw is nigh unforgivable.

While a few fun martial arts scenes pepper the effort, they are subsumed by an overall product that is riddled with plot holes, choppy cuts, laughable acting, and villains so evil that they’d make Skeletor blush.