A little background before I start. To a lot of people the MMFF has devolved into a running joke; a shallow ploy to milk the hard earned money out of Filipinos every Christmas. After the whole mess last year, things began to change. As part of the new initiative to revitalize the quality of the MMFF, the whole festival was revamped. As such, the kinds of films that would have been included in previous iterations of the festival were rejected. So, in a totally non-scientific manner, I am going to see as many of these rejected films as I can and eventually compare them to the films that made it in.
The Super Parental Guardians is Vice Ganda's latest movie. The plot of this movie is not as silly as last year's Beauty and the Bestie, but the main structure of the plot could have been written as part of a Mad Libs game for what it's worth.
There's one really glaring thing missing from this movie, and it's the presence of the late director Wenn Deramas. Even though Vice's previous films were silly and absurd to a fault, there was something about the pairing of these two people that made their films work in a B-movie Wong Jing kind of way. Unfortunately, there's little of that here, and Joyce Bernal's direction is capable, but a bit uninspired. The end product finds our characters going through the motions of the same old, same old. It all gets a bit tired by the end.
Vice's particular brand of comedy (and one's preference for it) usually determines how one will receive his movies, but even for fans, this time around the jokes are more miss than hit; there are some really funny moments, but some other jokes really left me by the wayside. The Leila De Lima joke got no laughs from me (and awkward chuckles from the audience) and making jokes about Extrajudicial Killings are in pretty bad taste, whether you are for them or not. Insult comedy walks a very fine line from humor to insensitivity, and the film crossed my personal line a couple of times.
Is this film, as they say, 'for kids?' I don't think so. Now I'm not going to tell anyone how to raise their children. But if I had a young kid/young brother/sister/nephew/niece/relative, I wouldn't let them watch this film. Why?
I'd ask you guys: how did you explain the abortion pun at the start of the film? How did you explain that insulting people is wrong? How did you explain to your daughter or son not to objectify anyone, male or female? How did you explain to them that if there's an emergency, like if someone came up to you with a knife up their back, you should take action and not make jokes out of dialing 911 (or 8888?) How did you explain the fact that making fun of killing people without due process is kinda tasteless?
And I hope you parents DID explain these things, because from experience, parents rarely do explain these things. And if you didn't, well congratulations to you for passively teaching your kids the wrong shit. Of course, maybe the kids didn't know better. Maybe all they got from the film was a noisy, entertaining distraction.
There IS one moral lesson in the film that the movie gets right: when Coco Martin's character tells his friend not to take revenge, and get back at the people who wronged them by legal means instead. That seems like a good thing to teach kids.
Of course, this movie being the movie that it is, completely ignores that notion in its tepid final act, where we get a fight sequence complete with Pokeballs and in-jokes. And its final sequence, that of an exploding train (to Boosan, we're told) really encapsulates the kind of movie Super Parental Guardians is.
A trainwreck.
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