Simplicity is a movie. I think.

Maria (Mary Joy Apostol) is an aspiring singer who "works" in her dad's burger place. Now I put work in quotation marks because she and her friend Beth slack around with their friends more than anything else, and the place doesn't get a single customer who is not a friend or family member. That business must be hemorrhaging money. When opportunity knocks in the form of a singing and dancing contest, Maria and Beth round up their friends to join the competition as a girl group (unsurprisingly called Team Simplicity) and achieve their dreams.

It's evident from the very start of Simplicity that it was made to showcase the talents of Primeline talent agency, et. al. To be fair, the girls who make up the main cast are relatively talented (one look at Apostol's work in Birdshot ought to do it, and some of the other cast are pretty good dancers). The problem is, and there's no getting around it, Simplicity is a terrible movie.

First off, the movie isn't very funny. None of the jokes really land. The technical work is really rough: at one point in the story, Maria's boyfriend Brett Primo (that really is his name, Jesus Christ) breaks up with Maria, and the camera follows Maria as she walks repeatedly from left to right. That scene literally gave me motion sickness. The editing is horrible too. The characters are written inconsistently. One of Maria's friends is a taong grasa named Angel (Kelly Welt) who is, to put it mildly, a few cards short of a deck. Miraculously, with no explanation at all, she gains her sanity towards the end of the film. Maybe Maria slipped in a little Lithium in her bacon or something. One of Maria's other friends, Shelly (Alexa Miro) is a traffic enforcer who runs around wearing a "sexy cop" outfit someone probably bought from Ebay. She also doesn't do a lot of traffic enforcement, with an attendance record that would probably make General Bato cry. The film has a bit of star power in the form of Rhian Ramos and Solenn Heussaff, who spend most of their time maiming each other on screen. I was worried they'd both be dead by the end of the film.

As a showcase of talent the film fails at that, too. The film decides to show the other contestants in the idol group competition, but only for 10 seconds at a time, using really weird camera angles and shots. It's as if the filmmakers didn't want the audience to see what was going on, and with the exception of some of the Simplicity Girls (Nami Onuma and Alexa Miro in particular), what was going on was mostly terrible, so it's not really a loss. 

A baffling parade of decisions from beginning to end, Simplicity is barely a movie. It feels like getting shot in the penis.