Mike (Luis Manzano) breaks up with Lester (Vice Ganda), his gay benefactor of three years and proposes marriage to his girlfriend Gemma (Toni Gonzaga).
Taking his brother-in-law's suggestion seriously, Lester pretends to be straight
and orchestrates several planned encounters with Gemma so she would fall in
love with him and consequently break up with Mike, in the hopes that the two of them could
still get back together. Realizing that she is a good person after all, Lester's
conscience gets the better of him, but how is he to tell the truth without
causing more heartaches along the way?
In the last three years, Vice Ganda has become a household name when
it comes to box office movies, something impressive considering how he is relatively a newbie and how his
projects are not really related to one another as part of the same franchise. Even so,
it would be difficult to say that box office receipts equate to quality, and
with Derramas directing what is really there to be expected other than the
usual slapstick fare? It is exactly because of this that this film succeeds
somehow. It is not really groundbreaking and the expectations are kind of low, but among Vice Ganda's three movies,
this one has the advantage of having the stronger storyline, less gimmicks, and a
more convincing portrayal of the role where we see more of him becoming the character rather than the character adjusting to him.
In
terms of acting, a few moments of brilliance can be seen, and the good thing is
that the heavy emotions are allowed to sink in without the signature Derramas
move of ruining the moment with a bad attempt to insert something comic just to
remind everyone that what they are watching is still a comedy. Vice Ganda has
his own moment. Toni Gonzaga has her own moment. Even Luis Manzano. In terms of
comedy, it is obviously Vice who carries the film thanks to his timing. Another
improvement would be how less of his sarcastic shticks are involved here. While
some people love them, one must admit that they are getting quite old. For this
role, he relies more on body language and facial expression, which is could be
considered as an improvement, coming from him.
The
story is not something that has not been done before but would suffice to give
the actors some space to play with the roles that they are given. Although the ‘homo-guy-pretending-to-be-straight’
storyline has just been used in Praybeyt Benjamin last year, here the break-up
angle contributes a lot to make the plot more credible to actually make sense.
It is something that is not far from happening in real life, and you could
treat the movie as one funny anecdote relating to such. This is not to say, though,
that the movie is very good, because it is not. Perhaps we are still light years
away from seeing a new template when it comes to comedies like this one. Maybe
Derramas should experiment on subtlety next time to substitute for flamboyance.
An actor need not always be on hyper mode to be considered funny.
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