The Guys - Another Raditya Dika's Heavier Comedy Movie

Yesterday night, my wife and I were invited to a food tasting event by a very nice couple who owned a famous restaurant in Bali (more on that in my wife's blog). As the event started at 9 PM, we had some extra time prior to that so we decided to see this movie first which started at 7PM in the mall very near the location and happened to be easily accessible from my office. We have actually noticed that the movie started to premier on the 13th of April and it was just nice timing that we could see it then. Now what is the movie all about?

Brief Story Line

Alfi (Raditya Dika - Hangout, Koala Kumal etc) was an employee of a creative agency who had big goals in life, one of them being a boss. In the office, he had 3 best friends who lived together in a rented house. The first was Rene (Marthino Lio) who had an on and off relationship with his girlfriend. The second one was Aryo (standup comedian Indra Jegel) who never had any relationship with a girl. And the third was a Thailand expatriate named Sukun (Phongsiree Bunluewong) who was given a company car that he used to drive all around with all of them.

After failing to build a romantic relationship with an intern named Via (Caitlin Halderman), Alfi turned his attention to another girl at work named Amira (Pevita Pearce - 5 cm, Tenggelamnya Kapal Van Der Wijck etc). And due to some heroic thing that he did, Alfi managed to make Amira intrigued with him. They started to know one another better after a date they enjoyed very much.

Amira then invited Alfi to have dinner at her house and introduced to her father. Of course Alfi's friends would try to give their crazy advice and inputs to his first visit to the house of a girl he likes. To the very much surprise of Alfi, he found out that Amira's father was actually his boss at the office Mr. Jeremy (Tarzan - Finding Srimulat, Warkop DKI Reborn: Jangkrik Boss! Part 1 etc). Mr. Jeremy was very well known for being a stern boss and lots of employees were afraid of him. After the catastrophic dinner, Alfi invited Mr. Jeremy and Amira to his mother's house for lunch.

This is when things got really complicated as Mr. Jeremy who had been single for many years after Amira's mother passing, met with Alfi's mother Mrs. Yana (Widyawati - Rectoverso, Pengantin Remaja and many more) who was a single mother after her husband left him more than a decade before. They seemed to be flirting and hitting it off easily.

Alfi now had a very tough decision to make whether to continue his pursue of Amira, or to backoff and let his mother have a happy life with some new guy who happened to be Amira's father. So what would happen to their relationship? And how would Alfi's friends help in this situation? Also how could Alfi reach his main goal of being his own boss? Find them all in this drama comedy movie.

End of Brief Story Line

Well after seeing this movie, I was a bit surprised. I had watched only 3 Raditya Dika's movies prior to this one and I had a feeling that this is one of his most serious works. Though there were some funny moments in the movie, I still felt that the drama was a bit heavier than the comedic situation. Some of those funny scenes were classic Raditya Dika, with his "expressionless" looks and some slapstick moments involving Sukun. 

One very memorable thing about the movie was the very nice soundtracks. One song particularly stood out titled Bila Bersamamu performed by the popular band Nidji (who had provided original soundtrack to movies such as Laskar Pelangi, 5 cm and even promotional song for Heroes TV series for South East Asian region). There was also the brief performance of another comedian Soleh Solihun as part of the office's senior personnel.

Be warned though since the movie seemed to be putting a rather heavy emphasis on the drama side, the movie should not be considered as a full comedy movie with nonstop laughter. The story itself was actually quite good and having a very good moral message. But people who are expecting the full comedy movie might feel it to be too heavy.

Now one thing that I am actually finding it odd was the title of the movie gave the impression that the story would be more on the relationship and friendship of these 4 guys. However, it felt that the storyline of Alfi, Amira, Mrs. Yana and Mr. Jeremy took center stage for too long period. Now don't get me wrong though, they did great job of portraying love sick persons (great performance by Widyawati and Tarzan), but the screen time of Alfi's friends felt too little and resulted to audience not being "connected" with their characters. It made the feeling that the 3 friends were more like the side characters rather than the main characters. The real more serious connections these guys supposedly have seemed to be emphasized in the latter part of the movie. If the focus were more towards Alfi's relationship, then the title probably would be more suitable had it not been "The Guys". But then again, that is my personal opinion.

Apart from the above though, my wife quite enjoyed the movie for those funny moments (I myself felt some of the jokes were a bit cheesy and few of them were not really good) and of course we liked the nice moral message and the very last part of the movie which I think should be a great message to viewers as well. My wife particularly was touched with the emotional moments in the last quarter hour of the movie.

So if you are a fan of Raditya Dika, I am not sure if you would enjoy this movie too much. As for those comedy seekers, you can give this one a try. By the way, since there was a very big Hollywood filme that was having a lot of hype at the moment titled The Fate of The Furious, seemed like all people were mostly watching that one. It was probably no surprise that the cinema was not full house yesterday. Perhaps during this long weekend, the cinemas showing this movie would be more fully packed.

Happy watching!

Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars