Buffalo, NY was recently listed as a top travel destination for the year 2020, citing its growing hotel and restaurant scene, historic architecture and numerous craft breweries as just a few reasons to visit New York state’s Queen City. Thanks to its recent waterfront redevelopment, numerous urban repurposing projects and newly found hip vibe, Buffalo has found itself on many lists like this over the last few years. One person who is apparently not aware of this, however, is screenwriter Brian Sacca, a Buffalo-suburb native who penned the film “Buffaloed,” a hate letter the Nickel City.
Like fellow Buffalonian Vincent Gallo, who wrote, directed and starred in “Buffalo ’66,” Sacca hightailed it out of the city and headed to Hollywood tout de suite, turning back just long enough to spit on their hometown. I can’t think of any other films in which the city in which its set is used for the sole purpose of being a constant punching bag (though I can’t imagine “Fargo” didn’t help the city’s reputation, despite the film largely not taking place there). There have been other films set in Buffalo (“Bruce Almighty,” “The American Side,” “The Savages,” to name a few), but none have had a disdain for the city like “Buffaloed” and “Buffalo ’66.” I’m aware the purpose of the film isn’t to be a travel log for the local tourism board, but it’s OK for the city to just be the backdrop without commentary.
“Buffaloed” stars Zoey Deutch as Peg Dahl, a peppy and overzealous want-to-be entrepreneur who grew up in lower-class Buffalo. Her dreams of attending an ivy-league school are squashed when she’s arrested for selling counterfeit Buffalo Bills tickets. After serving her time, she ends up forcing her way into a seedy and less-than-moral debt collections job run by a slimeball named Wizz (Jai Courtney), which entails mob-like tactics and rivalries.
As much as I wanted to like “Buffaloed,” it is a very unlikable film. For the purpose of full transparency, I too am a Buffalo native (if that wasn’t already obvious), and I will admit there may be some bias here. That said, there are problems all over the place with this film. First and foremost, the character of Peg is never written to the level of believability. She is written as a character, not a person. The fault lies solely on screenwriter Sacca and is no reflection on Deutch, whom I actually rather liked. She can play the heck out of spunky, but she deserved much better to work with. The same lack of believability can be said of Peg’s mother, Kathy (Judy Greer). Greer is another actress that I like, but she’s only given a moment or two that she can sink her teeth into.
Peg eventually ends up in a relationship of sorts with the prosecutor in her court hearing (Jermaine Fowler). I liked this character, and I thought Fowler was good in the role, but I found it very hard to believe that a successful attorney would end up in a relationship with a twenty-year-old ex-con from a down-and-out neighborhood. Don’t get me wrong, if that was the “Pretty Woman”-like basis of the film, I’d have no problem with it, but it’s handled in such a casual manner that it has no shot at credibility.
The debt collectors depicted in the film work out of locations like shady warehouses and 1970’s-era hair salons. I am no expert in debt collecting, but I did work for one for a short time in Buffalo, and I can say with quite certainty that this couldn’t be further from the truth. There are actually quite a few debt collection companies in Western New York, that much is true (at last count, the region was home to 4,700 debt collection workers, according to the Federal Trade Commission). But a vast majority work in legitimate office buildings with cubicles and break rooms and an “Office Space”-like atmosphere (though there have been a few bad eggs in the bunch). Here they run by gangsters who threaten violence and property damage to collect debts. The industry is actually very heavily regulated these days (we were advised that it is against the law to even mention that debt could impact your credit score). Even the process in which debts are purchased in the film is wrong, or at least outdated. Sacca appears to have done the absolute bare minimum research into the process when he wrote the script.
I once heard that Buffalo has more bars per capita than any other city in the country. I don’t know if this is true or not, but I can confirm that there are A LOT of bars. “Buffaloed,” on the other hand, has one bar, which is owned by Peg’s brother JJ (Noah Reid). It is inexplicably the only bar patronized by any of the characters. If the film was set in a small town with one neighborhood bar or focused on one particular neighborhood, it would make sense, but neither is the case here. I’d be curious to know if this was due to constraints with locations or if it was just lazy writing.
The film struggles to establish credibility through the first and second acts, but any semblance of a believable story is thrown completely out the window in the third act, which is completely devoid of reasoning or logic. There is almost a sitcom level of storytelling in “Buffaloed’s” climax, with a similar “wrap everything up” ending that was almost insulting.
I wouldn’t be doing justice to my hometown if I didn’t address a few issues I had with the film as a native Western New Yorker. Like “Buffalo ’66,” Buffalo is treated collectively as a bunch of Bills obsessed chicken wing eaters, and while that is 100% true, it’s portrayed here to the point of caricature. This is the Buffalo equivalent of the old SNL Bill Swerski’s Super Fans “Da Bears” sketch with George Wendt, which took Chicago’s obsession with their football team to comical extremes. If that’s the angle you want to go with as a screenwriter that’s fine, but here it doesn’t work as a running gag or to the benefit of the story. It seems to be written solely out of spite.
The Western New York accents are off a bit, though there is at least an effort being made. Deutch sounds as if she is leaning into her mother Lea Thompson’s native Minnesota accent, which isn’t actually that far off. Like Chicago, the Minnesota accent is a tad harsher than the Buffalo accent. The late Robert Forster, who grew up in nearby Rochester, had a quintennial Western New York accent. And in all my years in Buffalo, I don’t think I heard to word “jagoff” used more than a couple of times, if that, but EVERYONE says it in “Buffaloed.” It seems like it’s supposed to be a running Buffalo-based joke, but there is no basis to it.
Putting my bias aside, “Buffaloed” is not nearly as good as it could or should be. The talented cast is forced to tackle rather one-dimensional characters and a story that never quite feels grounded in reality. Bringing my bias back into the fold, the city of Buffalo deserves a better film than this.
“Buffaloed” is available on DVD and Blu-ray as well as digital download on It’s currently for rent via Amazon, YouTube, Google Play, Fandango Now, Vudu, Direct TV, Microsoft devices, and iTunes.
Quick Scan
One-dimensional characters and a story that never quite feels grounded in reality make for a disappointing film, despite star Zoey Deutch’s peppy performance.