The opening narration of No Boyfriend Since Birth explains that Carrie (Carla Abellana) has never had a boyfriend. As someone who works for a top-tier wedding dress boutique, she's helped plenty of brides walk down the aisle, but she's never been in a relationship herself. The reason for this, apparently, is that she's still hung up on her high school crush Carlo (Tom Rodriguez). She believes that the two of them are meant to be together, and that belief is tested when she runs into him again. She relentlessly pursues him, doing anything and everything to try and get him to fall in love with her.
Presumably, the movie wants the audience to root for its heroine. This is very difficult, because she is stupid, selfish, and melodramatic. The film has very strange ideas about romance in general. The story, on its way to its inevitable happy ending for the primary characters, doesn't even try to earn that happiness. It makes a much better case for the two of them not ending up together. It never really tries to give compelling reasons why these two people should even consider being in a relationship. It's just a bunch of nonsense strung together, before ending by default at a wedding with a closing voiceover.
The movie seems to go out of its way to make its main character unlikable. And this would be fine if that was the point of the story, but the movie acts as though we're still supposed to root for her happiness. But Carrie is a bizarre non-person, a collection of inexplicably clichéd quirks amounting to nothing in the end. The film mostly stumps for the romance in suffering for love. Carrie is willing to put up with terrible humiliations and actual physical pain in order to be with the one she loves. It’s a toxic idea to begin with, but the film makes it even more difficult to swallow with its particular brand of love.
The film wants us to believe that the reason she's so hung up in Carlo is because ten years ago, a school fair fortune Teller told her that her first and last boyfriend would have the letters A, L and O in his name. This idea gets even more stupid as it is revealed what was actually behind the prediction. But taken on its own, it's already supremely dumb. It is one thing to be a hopeless romantic. It is a complete other thing to be so dumb as to put so much stock in a random school fair prediction from ten years prior. It is insane.
The problems with the script are compounded with the poor production. The filmmaking is awfully lazy, and the sludgy editing doesn't help matters at all. In the lead role, Carla Abellana delivers what might be her worst performance. The actress is certainly capable of much more, but this script leaves her looking absolutely confused. Tom Rodriguez is even more awful. Rodriguez has never really shown much range, but here he really struggles. There's a lengthy scene in here where he delivers an apology that is pretty much unwatchable.
No Boyfriend Since Birth is bizarrely terrible. The romcom is a genre that rarely produces masterpieces at this point, but one tends to expect a basic level of quality from them. Not much is expected, but those well-worn elements tend to be delivered with some level of professionalism. This film is from a respected filmmaker, and it's just hard to believe that this film could have turned out as bad as it did if said filmmaker had given this project even just a fraction of the effort he's given others. The whole country deserves better.
My Rating:
