Petmalu is the latest in a slew of recent barkada movies where a gang of several people go through young people problems as they struggle to cohere as a group. Petmalu checks all the boxes in the checklist of barkada movie cliches (and then some) and it tries to innovate in some areas as well. However, there's one catch: the movie is a confusing, poorly structured mess.
The barkada behind Petmalu consists of seven people and there's a handy guide to memorizing all of them: the first letters of their names form the word Petmalu. Sure, "Unice" is kind of a weird way to squeeze in that last letter for a name, but hey, I guess the scriptwriter didn't want to use Ursula, Una or any other valid female name starting with U.
That said, aside from a handful of characters, it's hard to keep track of everyone, since their backstories are very similar. After the third straight scene where parents are arguing, they all started looking the same. This is not a good thing for a film whose sole purpose (I suspect) is to promote these kids to audiences. The only people whose plots I can really remember are Pete, who has a single mom, and Unice, who is the sole girl. There's the guy with an OFW mom who is seduced by a lonely woman with an OFW husband (kinda icky), the guy who is taking a college course that (gasp) HE DOESN'T LIKE TAKING, one guy has a drug problem (and squabbling parents), the other's parents are... overprotective or something? The most important of all the side stories is this one kid who is secretly gay, and his plot takes over the film for its last third.
There are also two stories near the end of the film that concern two girls tangentially related to the Petmalu crowd: one girl has an unrequited crush on one of the kids, and the other got knocked up by some guy (who isn't even part of the barkada.) The latter of these two women only shows up in two scenes. So there are now NINE plot threads in this film, ten if you include the overarching plot. This is worse than freaking Avengers Infinity War, for crying out loud. What's the point of over-stuffing this narrative with so many threads? There was a point in this film where scenes were three minutes long, tops, before moving on to the next character. It took me a half hour just to sort out who was who. The editing and the arrangement of scenes make it even worse - making the film almost unwatchable.
And the funny thing is, a lot of these subplots simply fizzle out near the last half. Aside from maybe one or two of these plots, they are either unresolved or nothing has changed at all with their situation. Even the big thing the barkada were striving towards turns out to be a giant red herring. Something tragic happens, but at this point I don't care, because I wasn't given enough time to know these characters.
The only halfway decent thing about this film is, and I'm not shitting you here, it's a musical. So I now have the distinct privilege of hearing some character I don't really know sing about something I don't care about. Yay I guess. Unfortunately, the singing disappears after an hour or so as things get a little more serious.
Petmalu feels like listening to ten people talking to you at once, with one person talking in poems, one person singing to you, and six people suddenly stopping mid-sentence. It's a confusing, poorly edited, poorly constructed mess of a film. But hey, we kinda get handsome hunks amirite
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