Raymond Red’s MMFF entry is a sepia-toned feel-bad movie about an inevitable creep into tyranny.
(SPOT.ph) There is almost no moment in Manila’s Finest, the new MMFF movie from Raymond Red, where the title doesn’t feel ironic. Its protagonist, Capt. Homer Magtibay (Piolo Pascual), is no saint: he’ll beat up a couple of guys who don’t pay their tab at a nightclub, presumably in exchange for a payoff. He’s made out to be a family man but he’s also having an affair with a prostitute. He tries to broker peace between warring gangs, but he is perhaps too quick to offer up the threat of violence.
He and his colleagues (Enrique Gil, Joey Marquez and Romnick Sarmenta) aren’t exactly the most upstanding people, but the film takes place in 1969 and it presents an alternative that’s even worse. Magtibay ends up investigating a series of violent incidents on his beat, and the evidence points to something much more sinister going on. It all seems to have something to do with the Philippine Constabulary, which at the time was consolidating power and threatening to take over all policing in the country.
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This is the wild trick of the movie: by all appearances, it is a sepia toned, nostalgia-tinged action movie about Manila policemen in a time of gang wars on the streets of the city. And it is not that at all. It is a document of a time when everything was going wrong, and little could be done to stop it. And we view it from the perspective of people who are by no means heroes themselves – they are simply collateral damage in a violent bid for power that has little room for any sort of protest. The story the film tells is a complete bummer, and it is remarkable for it.
The screenplay, credited to Michiko Yamamoto, Moira Lang, and Sherad Anthony Sanchez, is unsparing in its subversion. It has no desire to lionize the police, no compulsion to make them out to be anything more than a boys’ club that is occasionally able to do something positive. At best, they’re good for a funny line that lightens an awkward situation. The story as a whole is light on triumph, and is prone to lingering on characters in moments of despair. The narrative feels a little jumpy at points, indicating that perhaps not everything written made it on screen. But the pith of it is there: here is a terrible situation, a time of inevitable, horrifying change, and here are the hapless fools that have to deal with it.
Here is a terrible situation, a time of inevitable, horrifying change, and here are the hapless fools that have to deal with it.
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Frame after frame of remarkable energy
At some point, history becomes impossible to ignore. Though we see Magtibay trying to hold on to what counts for normalcy in his position, we know how this all turns out. And the inevitability of it is crushing. Technically, the film is strong. The edit could probably be a little tighter, but Red, who also serves as director of photography, produces frame after frame of remarkable energy. Piolo Pascual plays Magtibay as someone losing his footing, coming to the realization that what he thinks is true is no longer true. There is ample support from the rest of the cast, with Marquez and Sarmenta adding all manner of flavor to scenes, Cedrick Juan quietly casting a sinister shadow in every moment he’s in, and Ashtine Olviga given the responsibility of delivering what may be the film’s most crucial lines—and rising to the occasion each time.
It’s hard to say that people will want to be spending their Christmas watching a movie that is essentially a depiction of the march towards Martial Law; of the claws of tyranny gradually wrapping itself around the neck of an already imperfect institution. But for those that do, Manila’s Finest will prove to be a complex, thought-provoking work that is thorough in its exploration of how quickly things can fall apart, and how a lot of the issues back then still echo through this century. It feels bad, and it should feel bad.
Rating: 4 ½ stars
Manila’s Finest is an entry to the Metro Manila Film Festival and is showing in theaters beginning December 25.
Originally published on Spot.
