Pedro Calungsod: Batang Martir opens with the titular character's grisly fate. The film comes to define its subject through this singular act of sacrifice. For most of the movie, Calungsod is actually placed on the sidelines, a supporting character in his own film. It becomes painfully clear early on that the film has no insight to offer regarding its subject, never straying from a path of outright lionization. It makes for a terribly boring picture, since we don't really need a whole movie to tell us that a saint was a pretty good guy.
In the late 1600s, a Visayan named Pedro Calungsod (Rocco Nacino) joins a Jesuit mission to the Guam. He serves as personal steward to the Spanish Father Diego (Christian Vazquez), and quickly gains a reputation for being especially kind and devout. Though the mission is peaceful at first, it grows violent as a Chamorro chieftain takes offense at the foreigners in his land. Father Diego seeks to maintain peace between the natives and the Spaniards, but that soon proves to be impossible.
There isn't a whole lot of plot to uncover. The film largely drives the same few points over and over, without really exploring the underlying causes. And so the same set of events are played out repeatedly: Father Diego and Pedro do some good work, the natives harm someone from the mission, the Spanish soldiers get angry and want to fight back, and Father Diego tries to make peace. In between all this, there are a few scenes of Pedro wandering about, occasionally remembering a bit of his childhood.
And when all of this is put together, the picture formed is hazy at best. Scenes don't lead into each other, the film playing out a series of unconnected vignettes. Through it all, everyone's motives are pretty unclear. The film just does a terrible job of depicting the very simple details of the written accounts. It’s never clear, for example, what part the Chinese trader Choco plays in the growing unrest among the natives. The accounts have Choco playing a very important role in this story, but that doesn’t play out in the film. And Pedro himself remains a bit of a mystery, lacking the sort of definition that one would expect from a character whose name is in the title.
The only thing the film has to say is that Pedro is a really nice guy. That's probably true, but it's not very interesting. He's never the least bit conflicted about any of his choices, and that really keeps the film from developing any drama. Rocco Nacino does well enough with what he's given, but there isn't much there. The cast as a whole is hobbled by the lack of dimension in the writing. Christian Vazquez does his best as Father Diego, but he's forced to hit the same note again and again. Ryan Eigenmann is horribly miscast as Choco.
Pedro Calungsod: Batang Martir ends up not making a very good case for its titular character’s sainthood. He certainly seems to be a nice fellow, but he’s a supporting player in all this. If anything, the film makes a case for the sainthood of his Jesuit superior, Father Diego. It is the Jesuit at the center of this movie, holding on to his ideals even as things fall apart. Pedro is mostly there as a witness, a quiet, kind person who doesn’t have much of his own story to tell.
