32°C
Partly cloudy
Fri
29°C
Sat
29°C
Sun
29°C

Powered by WeatherAPI.com

USD $1 ₱ 56.28 0.0000 March 27, 2024
March 26, 2024
3D Lotto 9PM
505
₱ 4,500.00
2D Lotto 9PM
3013
₱ 4,000.00

‘Just the Way You Are’ Has Recycled Bones

The appeal of this film lies in the central players, as both Gil and Soberano attack their roles with plenty of earnest enthusiasm.

Just the Way You Are is the latest Star Cinema romantic comedy. It stars their most recent successful pairing of young actors, Enrique Gil and Liza Soberano, who have just completed a stint on a very popular TV show. Though the circumstances are a little different, and the stars have their own unique appeal, the movie feels like more of the same. And it isn’t just that the plot resembles that of She’s All That. The film’s bones feel recycled, the mainstream romcom machine clinging to a crumbling narrative structure that can no longer support the weight of competing concerns.

Drake (Enrique Gil) is one of the most popular guys in his high school. The movie begins with him losing a bet to one of his friends. As punishment for losing the bet, he is tasked with making a girl fall in love with him within thirty days, and then telling her that nine of it is real. The girl chosen for this challenge is Sophia (Liza Soberano), a recent transfer who has quickly gained a reputation for being a bit of a weirdo. Drake takes on the challenge, but finds that Sophia is unlike any other girl he's met.

Everything about this movie feels overly familiar. It isn't just that the main plot is lifted directly from She's All That and the myriad other stories that have played with The Bet trope. The structure is essentially the same as other recent Star Cinema romcoms. And the problems are the same as well. We start with a boy and a girl, both dealing with family issues. They don't like each other at first, but grow up close as they let their guards down through acts of kindness. Then they are split apart, and separately deal with their personal issues.

And then the movie brings them back together in the end, pretty much disregarding whatever awful things they did or said to each other. This is the reward for reuniting with parents or forgiving them for their failures. The movie waves away the conflict through a sequence that tends to involve some major gesture of affection, which tends to involve flowers or singing or both. This structure is inherently uninteresting, as the two sides of the story are rarely compatible. The romance side feels inconsequential next to the deep seeded angst of the family stuff. It almost feels like a distraction.

A film can still thrive within this structure though, as long as the component parts are well done. But this script is really clunky, with characters forced into awkwardly delivering wide swaths of exposition at various points throughout the story. A character explaining her job, for example, turns into a breathless, rapid-fire info dump that removes all possibility of verisimilitude. This limits the film's capacity for genuine drama. The appeal of this film lies in the central players, as both Gil and Soberano attack their roles with plenty of earnest enthusiasm. Though the roles are thinly drawn at best, the performances manage to charm somewhat.

Advertisement

Just the Way You Are puts the limitations of the local mainstream romcom on display. There is just a way that things are done, and more often than not it gets in the way of developing anything true or genuine. It's all overly constructed, the romance playing second fiddle to all the extraneous elements that the powers at be have decided are required in telling the story of young people falling in love. It was the problem with the recent Kathryn Bernardo-Daniel Padilla movie Crazy Beautiful You. It continues to be the problem here.

My Rating:

Share the story

Advertisement
Advertisement

Recent Posts

Hot Off the Press