A giant orange unicorn holds a television cast captive inside his world, sings cheerful songs, and slowly loses his mind. That is the premise of Buddy, and it is a strong one. Casper Kelly, who wrote the script with Jamie King, understands exactly how much can be done with taking children’s television and turning it against itself.
The Setup
Grace, played by Cristin Milioti, and Freddy, played by Delaney Quinn, are held captive inside a strange television world controlled by Buddy the Unicorn, voiced by Keegan-Michael Key. Topher Grace plays Ben. Michael Shannon and Patton Oswalt voice Willie and Strappy. The cast held inside this world is small, but every one of them earns their place.
Key is the reason this movie works at all. His Buddy starts as a cheerful, singing figure and turns into something far darker, and Key plays both ends of that change without ever losing the thread between them. Milioti holds the film together as Grace, giving it a human center to set against Buddy’s rising madness. Shannon and Oswalt round out the voice cast, though the film gives little away about how their characters look or sound beyond that.
The satire here is pointed and full of blood in equal measure. Buddy takes the bright, neat language of children’s shows and turns it violent, and the space between the two is where the film finds its best jokes and its worst moments. It is built for an audience that wants to laugh and shudder in the same breath.
The pacing is where Buddy struggles. The film knows how to open a door toward something stranger and more interesting, then it closes that door and sends you back into flatter, more repeated ground. This happens more than once. Just when the story looks ready to go somewhere new, it returns to safer, plainer beats.
Critics did not agree on how well the film holds together, even as most agreed on its boldness. Their reactions:
- One review called it everything a midnight audience could want.
- Another described it as strange and bold, a package that should not have worked, adding that it does, and it is hard to believe it exists at all.
- A third said the film kept promising something better on the horizon, only to draw viewers back into dull, dark scenes, adding that the audience deserved far more than what this weak production delivers.
Numbers on the Board
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Length | 95 minutes |
| Age rating | R |
| Critic score | 89% |
| Metacritic score | 67/100 |
| IMDb score | 7.6/10 |
| Audience score | 8.325/10 (40 votes) |
| Total gross | $14.2 million |
| Domestic gross | $5.5 million |
Those numbers tell a real story. Audiences enjoy Buddy more than the more careful critical scores suggest, and that difference fits a film that is more about mood and pace than order. This is a film built to be watched loudly, in a full room, not studied line by line.
Verdict
Buddy is not a tightly built thriller and it is not trying to be one. It is a genre experiment, a dare, a bet that a singing unicorn losing his hold on reality can carry a full length of horror comedy. Kelly and King win that bet more often than they lose it.
The film’s strongest strength remains its premise, and its clearest weakness is what happens in the middle of that premise. It sets up a rise and then levels it out, repeats beats instead of building on them, and asks you to sit through dull parts when it clearly has better ideas ready.
Still, nothing else at the cinema is doing what this movie is doing. There is nothing safe about it. Keegan-Michael Key’s voice work alone is worth the price of admission, and the satire of children’s television is carried out with real daring rather than empty surprise.
Buddy is a strange, funny, sometimes tiring watch that mostly earns its place as a curiosity for a late show. It has a strong hook, a committed voice cast, and a willingness to go further than most studio comedies dare. It also has pacing problems that keep it from being the classic it could have been, sending the audience back into flatter ground just when the story is ready to break loose.
This is a film to see with others, when you are ready for something wild. It rewards that kind of watching far more than a quiet, careful one. Buddy earns its following honestly, blood and all, even if it never quite becomes the tighter, better film sitting inside it.
67 of 100.
