The Great Buddha+ (2017)

"If you're not good, we need mutual understanding"

I went into The Great Buddha+ blind thinking it might be about a spiritual journey. Uh, no. This film had numerous lewd jokes and comments and pretty much audio porn. It looked like a low budget art house movie filmed mostly in black and white. The title was not false advertising as there was a big brass Buddha at the center of unsavory events.

Belly Button lives hand to mouth, eking out a living by collecting and selling recyclable materials and junk. Too poor to drink, he eats one meal a day consisting of food thrown out in the evenings by convenience stores. He is pretty much at the bottom rung of the social ladder if he’s on the ladder at all. Fortunately for him, he meets with Pickle every day at his friend’s night job guarding a factory that makes among other things Buddha statues. Belly Button orders the passive Pickle around, the only person he can tell what to do. Pickle’s boss, Kevin, isn’t nice but is also the object of their envy with his wealth, Mercedes, women, and powerful friends. When the tv breaks down in the office, a bored Belly Button suggests they watch the dashcam from the boss’ car. Turns out Kevin has a car sex fetish which provides hours of amusement for the down on their luck friends…until they see something they shouldn’t or at least wish they hadn’t.

The film hammered home that Belly Button and Pickle were poor and powerless, out of the reach of justice. When they died, if they were lucky, their chalk line would look like a man and not a circle. No one truly knew the other. Men like Kevin weren’t held accountable for their actions as the courts were run by and for the wealthy. The other oft used image was the dashcam. The only color in the film was through the eyes of the dashcam lens. The witness of even heavily edited dashcam recordings was the reality of the nightly news and life. The director provided narration sporadically through the film, sometimes for the better and sometimes as a spoiler of coming events. My biggest problem with the film was that many scenes dragged on for far too long and side characters who added little were often introduced.

The Great Buddha+ had interesting concepts and even inspired a few laughs. The messages overall were bleak. Pickle and Belly Button had come to the conclusion that the only way their lots in life could change would be for the worse. Fate had not been kind with the families they’d been born into. The titular brass Buddha observed all the dirty and sad goings on with a placid face. Sometimes a flower can bloom on a pile of trash, sometimes the flower just gets stepped on before it can bloom. The Buddha may have been hollow, but did karma get the last laugh?

1 May 2025
Trigger warnings: Partial nudity, sexual content, lewd comments

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