Who's That Girl?

♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

After seeing her high school crush’s name on the obituaries, Elizabeth Pedrosa (Anne Curtis) heads straight to the wake and loudly expresses her grief and undeclared love for the guy. It is not until she sees the body in the coffin does she realize that it is the father, John Eduque Sr., who actually died and not the son (Luis Manzano). In the background, wife Belinda (Eugene Domingo), along with the many guests are flabbergasted leading them all to ask out loud, “Who’s that girl?!”

The movie is another example of a Wenn Deramas comedy that relies on exaggeration and overacting to deliver a point. The thing about this is that the trick is getting old. The said director has a movie out every year and the technique used is not changing at all, only the actors are. On second thought, most of the actors are recurring like Eugene Domingo and Deejay Durano, and even Anne Curtis. While the movie is enjoyable at some point, majority of the jokes fall flat and in the end you just laud the effort of the actors because you know they can do better and probably just wanted to do something light as a breather for their next big movie role. In Domingo’s case that would be her role in Ang Babae Sa Septic Tank. For Anne Curtis, it is her role in No Other Woman.

There really is nothing interesting about the story. In fact while seeing this you might just get the urge to pommel the lead character with something hard on the head because her dilemma is so stupid and the solution involves something as simple as coming clean and clarifying things with the people involved. The whole plot drags around this one mistake that could have been easily corrected, but then again if she did that, there would be no movie.

Domingo and Curtis are the reason why I decided to give the movie three clovers instead of two. Again, it all comes down to personal bias, but these two make the movie watchable, at least. Their banter, even if a lot of it did not make any sense, was fun to watch and you can see the two ladies just having fun with their roles. The other members of the cast are either overacting or their roles are negligible and were obviously just added for comedic effect. Manzano removes his shirt more than once, as usual. This is annoying because you would like to believe that the guy could act after his stint in that In My Life movie, but instead chooses such senseless roles just to be in a movie. On the contrary, it is nice to see Curtis and Miss Dina Bonnevie in one frame again years after their mother and daughter tandem in that soap opera called Hiram.

It is also interesting to note how product placements have been blatantly placed all over the movie, with the preponderance of SMDC, which Curtis endorses. There will come a point while watching it when you would like to think that the movie is actually just one long SMDC commercial, which would probably explain the mediocre story and bad storytelling.

The movie experience would have been different had I seen it in a movie house with other people, but seeing it on DVD just makes me want to dismiss it as one long and boring movie made to persuade you to buy a condo unit from SMDC.