One man. A sword. A legion of bad guys. The formula seems simple enough, and combined with decent special effects and great production design, this 2009 version of Ang Panday really ought to have been a home run. And yet it isn’t. Poor direction and a mess of a script pretty much waste the film’s otherwise excellent production values, giving us a film that might have been worth watching if there weren’t any people in it.

Long ago, the evil wizard Lizardo (Phillip Salvador) sent an army of monsters to subjugate the land and its people. Lizardo succeeded, but a prophecy tells of a comet that will fall to Earth, and a man who will wield a weapon that will free the people from Lizardo’s tyranny. Flavio (Bong Revilla Jr.) is a blacksmith content with living a quiet, uneventful life in a town mostly untouched by Lizardo’s evil. But when the comet of prophecy lands on the outskirts of town, Flavio’s destiny is immediately made clear.

Clear enough that nothing that happens in the movie is ever placed in doubt. The entire first act of the movie is dedicated to telling the audience over and over again that Flavio is indeed the hero in question, destined to defeat Lizardo and all that. The prophecy, which isn’t too difficult to understand, is repeated several times in many different ways over the course of the film, never allowing the audience to think for even a moment that Flavio might fail, or that there might be more to the prophecy than one might initially think. Right from the start, we know that Flavio’s going to kill Lizardo, and the movie constantly reminds us of that, leaving absolutely no room for any sort of suspense to build.

It doesn’t leave room for much else either. In its fervor for prophecy, the movie doesn’t really dedicate much time to building its characters, or fleshing out the world they live in. Flavio runs into several characters in his journey, but none of them are given anything that might resemble a personality. They’re all just cardboard cutouts made to fawn over Flavio, in his absence practically losing all reason for existing. Flavio himself is just one notch above cardboard. Bong Revilla portrays our hero with a permanently furrowed brow, the furrow shifting in gradations to express different kinds of emotion. The lightest furrow is confusion. The deepest is anger. Somewhere in between is love and sadness. It’s really hard to tell. Revilla’s lack of range isn’t limited to his face, however. He just doesn’t have the physicality to pull off the action scenes as they are currently designed. Rhian Ramos manages to look more convincing than the veteran action star, wielding her blades with some measure of agility. The movie is forced to shoot around Revilla’s limitations, employing clunky-looking sped up shots and terribly disjointed edits. The fights from the original Panday looked better than this.

But the truth is that we didn’t even need the action scenes to look all that good. It isn’t the choreography that makes a movie fight worthwhile; it’s the emotion behind it. And this is where Ang Panday truly fails. The script, despite its blindingly simple prophetic device, doesn’t have any sort of cohesive narrative arc, sending our hero and his cronies into one random situation after another, with no regard for growth or tension or any of those silly things that might make you care about what’s happening. It’s appears that many of these scenes were designed simply to provide a platform for a special effect, or to give a young actor something to do, or just maybe, to stretch out the runtime.

Deep in the second act, the movie introduces a subplot about a defiant slave girl and an unwilling conscript in Lizardo’s army. They come in out of nowhere, do a bunch of things that don’t matter in the long run, and are never mentioned again. The subplot, which takes up four sequences in the film, could’ve been removed completely without changing the overall picture. But it’s there. We’re probably supposed to feel something for these characters, but I can’t even remember their names. Most of the film plays out this way: something gets introduced in the middle, stuff happens, nobody cares.

The one positive thing about the film is that it mostly looks pretty good. The production design makes the film look a lot better than it actually is, with sets that look like they could’ve come out of a Hollywood blockbuster. The special effects, credited to Rico Gutierrez, are a real step up from most local productions. The amazing sets and the CGI create a pretty convincing world all on their own. It’s just too bad that there are people in it. Who do stuff. And say things.

And so, Ang Panday at least proves that on a production level, the local industry is capable of pretty great things. It is a testament to the ingenuity of some of our artists, who make this film look better than it has any right to be. Sadly, it also proves that story still seems to be the last thing on the mind of the mainstream. Ang Panday didn’t need the most complex plot, or the deepest characters. Like most big action films, it just needed to give us something to care about, and tell that story in the straightest way possible. This film, seemingly assembled by drawing ideas out of a hat, can’t even provide that.

My Rating: