Let's take a short break from the Cinemalaya films and look at a local film that has just come out. Master Director (tm) Toto Natividad is probably best known for his work on the teleserye Ang Probinsyano. Before that, he directed a number of action films in the nineties and early noughts, most notably the 2006 cinematic masterpiece Tatlong Baraha starring the Lapids.
The trailer showed a lot of footage of people getting killed extrajudicially, so I naturally assumed this was an EJK film. What I didn't expect was how much it supports the current war on drugs. I guess, looking at the title, I shouldn't be surprised.
After getting busted in a drug operation (where he miraculously stays alive,) Jeff is hired by a tough talking dirty cop (Jeric Raval) to kill drug pushers and users for him. Now you'd normally expect that Raval's character is portrayed as a cartoonishly evil villain, but no, Jeff actually sides with the potty mouthed policeman, spouting such oft-repeated rhetoric such as "the police are killing only bad people", and "I'm doing this for the nation, the future of my kid and for peace and safety." Soon, even his wife (Phoebe Walker) gets involved in the killings and they both become a team of druggie-killing assassins. Again I expected her to be the voice of reason, but my faith in this film is clearly misplaced, as the film seems to be populated by idiots.
Technically, the film looks like shit, and I really do mean shit because the color palette is a sickly shade of brown. The camerawork is so shaky and jittery that I thought the cameraman was a paranoiac who was furiously masturbating as he held the camera. It certainly does no favors to the action scenes, because the camera is darting all over the place so one barely knows what's going on. The sex scenes recycle footage, leading me to believe they only had the budget for one sex scene. They even have a sex scene to celebrate a successful killing. Cars turn over and explode at random, which is kind of a 90's Filipino action move staple, I guess. At least the drone shots were nice.
Now I'd be content to leave the film as it is, but suddenly it seems to backtrack a bit on the rhetoric it had been spouting so far. So is it a film that supports the war on drugs, or is it secretly against the war on drugs by showing us how ludicrous the entire thing is? Should I be spending brain cells on this? Probably not, then again thanks to this flip floppery I actually have no idea what the film's trying to say, as the ending leaves us in ambiguity. I need a paracetamol badly. So this is either the most bizarre film I have ever seen, or the most stunning work of genius. Truly, a Master Director (tm).
10/10 bestest movie of the 20th century uguu~
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