There have recently been a couple of movies about Andres Bonifacio, each interesting in its own way. Mario O’Hara’s Ang Paglilitis ni Andres Bonifacio from 2010 focused solely on the trial that would lead to his execution, playing it up as a bit of political theater. In 2012, Richard Somes gave us Supremo, which is a pretty straightforward biopic that attempted an epic scale with a smaller budget. Bonifacio: Ang Unang Pangulo takes the story to the mainstream, as one of the films in the Metro Manila Filmfest. It is a lavish, big budget production with legitimate reasons. It is sadly also an unfocused, dramatically inert telling of this particular story.
We first properly meet Bonifacio (played here by Robin Padilla) in the film as a member of La Liga Filipina. He becomes a friend of Jose Rizal (Jericho Rosales), and has discussions with him about the approach the country must take in order to achieve independence. After Rizal’s death, Bonifacio becomes a prominent member of the growing resistance, and it is his leadership that brings people together under the flag of the Katipunan. The film follows the hero through 1892, where he first meets his second wife Gregoria de Jesus (Vina Morales), all the way to his final days in Cavite.
Aside from the historical scenes, the movie also devotes some of its time to a present day framing device that stars Daniel Padilla, RJ Padilla and Jasmine Curtis-Smith as high school students learning about Bonifacio from museum curator Eddie Garcia. There is nothing really gained from these scenes in the present. Though they set something up in the start regarding Daniel Padilla’s character, in the end they just seem to be there to link together the disparate scenes from the life of Andres Bonifacio. The film also uses them as a direct means of delivering the movie’s point, the last bits of voiceover completely dedicated to the proposition that the history we’re being taught isn’t right.
The film takes the highlight reel approach to biography, picking out only certain scenes from the life of its subject to dramatize. And it doesn’t really work. The film never gives itself a chance to develop any of these particular threads. A lot of time in the beginning, for example, is devoted to the courtship of Gregoria de Jesus. But after they’re married, Gregoria de Jesus all but disappears from the movie, and only shows up again near the end. This happens with a lot of other threads as well. The movie doesn’t commit to any dramatic conceit, and dampens its impact as a result.
To the film’s credit, it looks pretty great. There are a couple of standout sequences in the film that go well beyond one has come to expect from the Film Fest. There is big action set piece that’s chaotic and exciting while still managing to be completely coherent. And when the film lets the camera go wide, it proves to be capable of delivering knockout images. The film might also be notable for Robin Padilla’s performance. He falls back on old habits in the bigger scenes, but he manages to tone down the overt machismo in the earlier scenes. It’s just nice to see the actor go smaller than he usually does.
Bonifacio: Ang Unang Pangulo will likely garner the largest audience among the recent films that have tackled the hero. And that’s kind of a shame. Though it is the most technically polished of the three, it is also the least interesting. It is undoubtedly a good thing that this story is being told, that there exists a mass entertainment that seeks to educate the masses about a really tumultuous portion of our history. But the movie fails to make its subject and its main points compelling. The other two movies, despite their comparative lack of resources, found better ways to tell this story.
My Rating:
