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Let's get the most important bit out of the way first: this is a bad bad movie--I use the double "bad" here not to emphasize the degree of"bad-ness" but to emphasize that this is not one of those movies that are so terrible that you can have a riot watching them again and again with your friends as a test-of-courage-and-drinking-game hybrid (like, say Tatlong Baraha).
(WARNING: SPOILER ALERT)
There are some good moments: I like the fact that the ending was not the expected "happily-ever-after" and I enjoyed the scene where Pacquiao's character displays his devotion for his children by appearing in a home-sewn costume at a school event--only to realize his kids had lied to him so that he would appear "cool" to their classmates. These moments however are few and far (very far) between.
This is not to say that there is no person or group of persons out there who will enjoy this movie--although from the early box office ratings, it seems that these hardy souls are in the minority--but whether or not one enjoys a creative work is, to some extent, subjective. While there are aspects of the movie that I did not enjoy for reasons that might be personal to me (such as wanting a hero to actually fight crime rather than merely pound on super villains and super crabs), there are also quite a few more objective reasons to say that Wapakman is a poorly made film.
Rumor has it that Wapakman was not completed on time, and the film does give off an impression similar to that of a crammed class project, one where scenes are only shot once, not because they were perfect the first time out, but because those involved simply want to move on to the next. The end result? A film where the strings/cords used for the aerial acrobatics are made obvious by tell-tale blurring, and where it is blatantly obvious when the man in the Wapakman costume is Manny, and when it is his stunt replacement (I hesitate to use the term stunt "double" because the man's silhouette was nothing like Pacquiao's). While I certainly don't believe a movie should be judged solely on the basis of its visual effects (I found Avatar to be merely adequate as a film) certainly there are minimum standards which need to be maintained if one decides to make use of them at all. The film makers could have opted to have one super-villain instead of a mini Rogue's Gallery, and focused their budget on making the ensuing fight scenes truly impressive, but apparently they do not subscribe to the idea that a creative work is only as strong as its weakest part. The fact that some visual effects were decent (the magma-look of Combustor for instance) does not make up for these glaring defects--nothing removes a viewer from immersion in a story quite like seeing the strings bearing the "flying" hero aloft--nothing, perhaps, except for breaking the 4th wall, as in a scene where a character actually has Wapakman literally bring the film's director out on to the screen.
The scene typifies the identity crisis at the core of the film, a failure to understand that certain elements simply do not go well together. Sometimes the film portrays itself as a parody of superhero films and of Philippine culture, including plenty of Filipino style word-play and references to current events, and if the film had stuck to that genre it might have come off better--but instead, it has instances where the toilet humor (literally sometimes, as Pacquiao's character is a septic tank cleaner) is followed by scenes which are supposed to somehow tug at our heart strings, but instead just seem off: it's hard to feel for Mystika as she's tearing up over the death of her dad, when the villains can access his spirit through a makeshift Ouija board drawn on a sheet of paper.
Even at its core, Wapakman seems unsure as to whether it is meant to be a movie, or simply a vehicle for Manny Pacquiao. Don't get me wrong, while I'm no avid Pac-Fan, I respect him as an athlete and enjoy the narrative he's constructed through his exploits. Yet when the movie makers don't even bother to cover up Manny's tattoos that have the names of his real life wife and children (nor simply go through the effort of explaining the tattoo in the film, or giving his wife a similar name), then I don't feel like any effort is being made to make this an actual movie--and whether a person comes to the theatre as a fan of Manny or as a fan of cinema, the least the creators of the movie could have done was to make it seem like they'd actually tried. Acting abilities aside, they could have done so many other films--a low-key, no-effects superhero film like Unbreakable, a gritty-no-powers fighting film like Unleashed, even a straight-up superhero parody like Superhero Movie… and the tragedy is, these might have worked.
Instead, we get this; it's akin to entering the boxing ring to discover that instead of training for the fight, your opponent has spent the last six months learning how to draw abs on his stomach with a ballpoint pen--and he doesn't even have the decency to use black ink. It's not the failure that rankles… it's the disrespect.
Further Reading:
- Official Poster and Synopsis (Twitch)
- Wapakman Escapes Fine from MMFF (Manila Bulletin)
- Pacman Flick Knocked Out on First Day (Inquirer)
- Manny Pacquiao in Movies (Asian Movie Pulse)
- MMFF 2009 Parade: Wapakman (the persistence of vision)
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