Tatay Kong Sexy appears to have been shot a while back. After all, its lead actor, Jinggoy Estrada, has been in prison for some time now. But it arrives in our theaters anyway, likely a final attempt to get something out of the resources already poured into its making. It is a strange bit of hubris to declare this film worthy of commercial release. It is an aimless, shoddily made picture that at best feels rushed and unfinished.
Widower Paquito (Jinggoy Estrada) runs an auto repair business while trying to raise three children on his own. Monette (Maja Salvador) is a City Hall fixer hustling her way through life while raising her estranged sister's abandoned kid. The two meet when Monette brings her car into Paquito's shop. The two have very strong personalities that clash initially, but they come to confide in each other as they spend more time in each other's company. And the two help each other out as they go through some turbulent times in their lives.
The film is ostensibly about Paquito and Monette, but it quickly shifts focus to the story of Paquito's eldest daughter, Mariel (Empress). Paquito doesn't want her to date, but she's secretly been seeing someone. Also, Mariel doesn't approve of her father seeing anybody, and she immediately assumes that Monette is Paquito's new girlfriend. And then the plot takes another turn when it turns out that Mariel is pregnant. When all is said and done, this movie doesn't really seem to have a center at all. Though Paquito is in most scenes, he doesn't really have a lot to do. He's mostly just reacting to things happening around him.
It's tough to tell what this film is really supposed to be. It just rambles around stock family plots without any substantial drama. Or humor. Or anything that might be construed as a definite approach. It drifts aimlessly through its wisps of plot, never turning into a real story. It could be argued that the film is just mimicking the random nature of real life, but the treatment doesn't bear that out. It all feels stilted and artificial, the dialogue unnatural and the shooting overly stage-y. The closest the film comes to having the motif are the myriad establishing shots of the restaurants in which the characters eat.
And so the movie is mainly puzzling. There is some potential in the story of a mismatched pair of single parents learning from each other as they deal with very different problems, but none of it surfaces. Some of the plot threads are never really resolved, the movie suddenly terminating before anything can be made of it. The direction is awfully flat, and the performances are pretty terrible. Neither Jinggoy Estrada nor Maja Salvador is able to make their friendship seem plausible. It always feels like the two shouldn't even be in the same room.
Tatay Kong Sexy feels like a project that was long abandoned. There are certainly circumstances that could have gotten in the way of this film's production, like the incarceration of its lead star, and maybe the death of one of the supporting players. Whatever the case, it certainly doesn't feel ready for release. But it arrives in our cinemas anyway, perhaps the producers attempting to salvage what they had already invested into the project, in spite of all the obvious deficiencies. It's kind of interesting as this weird case study of what happens when life gets in the way of making a movie. But it definitely isn't worth seeing because of that.
My Rating:
