Metro Manila – Film Review
Director: Sean Ellis
Starring: Jake Macapagal, Althea Vega and John Arcilla
Release Date: Out Now
Oscar Ramirez (Jake Macapagal) struggles to support his family and adapt to life in the Filipino City of Manila in the independently produced drama, Metro Manila. Written by Sean Ellis and Frank E. Flowers and directed by Sean Ellis and also starring Filipino actors Althea Vega and John Arcilla, the film chronicles Oscar’s crisis of conscience as he tries to keep a clean slate amidst the surrounding corruption of the city.
In watching this film I had that rare pleasure of having absolutely no idea what the film was about or who made it , which is often thought to be the best way to see any film and in this case I think that proved to be true as it brought to light a couple of important things about it.
I was totally engaged for the first half of Metro Manila. The film maintains a wonderfully straight forward and elemental narrative. I found the characters perfectly understandable and relatable and I was very pleasantly anticipating each turning point in the story. The film takes a very slow approach in developing its characters. Incredibly slow in fact, and yet it remains endearing. The film also makes the smart decision of using its cultural references to merely create a backdrop for the film, although the fact that the film is merely named after the real life city kind of rides the line.
I guess the truth is this is a very hard film to analyse considering its simplicity, and while this quality proved appealing at first, it was into around the last third of the film where it started to come apart.
It’s in the later part of the film that suddenly it takes a much faster paced approach in an attempt to tie everything up conclusively and while this might typically be the more ideal approach for a film overall, I felt it broke what was working about the narrative before this change. When I say faster paced, I do mean it in a literal sense, and I don’t mean to imply that it becomes a more action packed film.
I really mean it when I say that Metro Manila is not in any way an action film despite what might be implied by the film’s trailer. It does have its moments of physical action and violence but not enough to say the film is based in any of this kind of activity and really for the great majority of the film, the scenes are based completely around the interaction between its characters.
While on this topic I should admit that I was expecting the film to build up to some action based conclusion, probably due to the very little marketing that I had witnessed for the film and because I may have unfairly compared the film to The Raid before seeing it (UK directed film in a Southeast Asian country), and while I may have been biased with these expectations, I still maintain that there was something off about how it all wrapped up.
Aside from this everything else about the film is perfectly good, but not remarkable. The cast perform very naturally and every character that is given any decent amount of focus can be sympathised with, even when ones greatly conflict with others and as I’ve said, all the information is very clear.
In the end, Metro Manila is an engaging and in some points, compelling drama and while I was greatly drawn in for much of it, it was hard to feel like I had really taken away an awful lot from seeing it and it’s harder to imagine that it’s a film that will stay with me. That said, if you’re simply looking for an crime thriller or action based kind of film you won’t get it here but if you want to watch a well made and perfectly enjoyable ambient drama then it’s definitely worth a look.
Score: 3.5/5
Written by Sèamus Hanly
