I'll Be There

♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

As a Father's Day presentation this movie could get a passing score for its timeliness. As a Star Cinema movie, yehey for taking a break from the romantic comedy genre. As a KC Concepcion movie it is again over-hyped for all the wrong reasons. When a movie full of hype fails to deliver, it gets panned, and/or it flops. There is no confirmation yet if this film is flopping, but based on different reviews it is already getting panned, and in my opinion, not without reason.

It seems like an innate father-daughter trait. Newsflash, you are in a movie! Why do you have to deliver your lines as if you were doing a TV commercial? Bits of overacting here and there from KC, which weirdly complements bits of underacting here and there from Daddy. Gabby Concepcion's acting is stuck in the 80's, very much like how Sheryl Cruz's acting is stuck in the 90's. She is not in this movie though. Apologies, I digress. Just looking for obvious comparisons. Her name was somehow the first to come to mind.

At least Jericho Rosales is here, he could easily top an acting competition if those two are the only others involved. He tries to be funny through his lines, and most of the time succeeds. His chemistry with KC was not feeling well and had to call in sick when they shot the film, so do not expect to see it in the finished product. That Cacai girl is funny too. The gay sidekick is annoying. They should have just gotten Candy Pangilinan again.

In fairness to KC her acting has improved here, but how can we be sure that it really did? Maybe she is just relatively better in this movie because it hits very close to home. In fact, too close to home. The drama scenes involving father and daughter are believable, or maybe it is just the in-your-face real life parallelism that lends a semblance of credibility that would have been absent in those scenes if they were not father and daughter in real life. It is really hard to tell.

The director is good. He tries to experiment a bit with some shots where he tries to visually portray the feeling of the character at that given moment. The dream sequences are okay at first but easily gets redundant after two repeats. The plot is predictable and does not risk any twists to make the viewing experience more enjoyable. Dragging in a lot of parts.