During my last year of medical school, our batch was sent to San Juan, Batangas for our Community Medicine rotation. There's a variety of barangays in the municipality, ranging from cozy seaside villages to remote villages near the mountainside, and as only men in our block, we were sent to the latter. A good half hour away from the bayan by tricycle (and as you may expect, even longer by foot), it was one of the most remote villages in the entire municipality, consisting only of a smattering of houses. During one particular week, a karaoke machine served as the sole source of entertainment. My fellow intern and I decided to sing along, and it was clear the people of the town had their song preferences: the most popular song by far was Teeth's Laklak. But firmly in second place, collectively, were the songs of one April Boy Regino.
There's something about Regino's songs that make them extremely fun to sing. During a week where people were debating the annoyance of having people sing songs during a musical film, this was the film that made me sing out loud in a cinema, and not the other one. Thankfully, there were only three of us in there and the sound system over at Fisher Mall was loud enough to drown out my feeble attempts at singing. Despite its problems, Idol: The April Boy Regino Story transported me back to carefree times at the karaoke house in the province or back home. It's something that I appreciated, even though it struggles to reveal anything at all about its primary subject.
Idol: The April Boy Regino Story is about as straightforward as it gets, to the point where it's like the filmmakers consulted the Wikipedia page of April Boy and called it a day. Most, if not all, of the film's major plot points come from the page, to the point where anything not covered in the wiki isn't included in the film either. I would've loved to see various points of the man's career, including a short stint in acting (do you know he starred in a superhero movie with Carmina Villaroel?) and his long careers in Japan and the US are only barely alluded to.
To its credit, there are some points in the film where they try to show some of the man's inner turmoil: when he runs into problems and disagreements with his brothers Vingo and Jimmy (also his bandmates in the musical trio April Boys) the film cuts to a rendition of Regino's Umiiyak ang Puso, whose lyrics fit in with his current predicament. However, those moments are the exception to the rule. Despite being a biopic, the film doesn't say much about its subject's interiority.
Great moments are few and far between. Most notably, when Regino's most iconic song Di Ko Kayang Tanggapin starts to play, it's hard not to get swept along, despite the partially unserious, tongue-in-cheek goings on in the background.
Idol: The April Boy Regino Story operates with the energy of a tv special, its well meaning and committed performances befitting that of something you might see in GMA's Dramarama sa Hapon or Magpakailanman. It gets even worse during the film's second half, mostly dedicated to Regino's spate of health problems during the last decade or so of his life. Regino (John Arcenas) goes to a pair of doctors in America. I know they are American because of the very prominent American flags on their desks. One of them tells Regino, who is suffering from prostate cancer, that they are going to prescribe him some antibiotics, which is not something that's used directly for cancer. One of those doctors even stumbles on their words, calling a benign tumor malignant, as if second takes don't exist.
The film ultimately means well, and to be fair it's much better than a bunch of its biopic contemporaries (Isko, Kahit Maputi na ang Buhok Ko, Sa Kamay ng Diyos). If you recognize any of those films, just know that this film is better than them. It's not a particularly high bar to scale, but the man's music more than makes up for its numerous flaws, at least for me.
