‘My Rebound Girl’ Review: Love is bland

The biggest problem of Emmanuel dela Cruz’s My Rebound Girl is that it is a romantic comedy that is barely comedic and rarely romantic.

Follows formula

The movie religiously adheres to its genre’s formula, featuring the very basic story of a man and a woman starting out as annoyances to each other before turning into lovers.

Rocky (Alex Gonzaga) is the perennial rebound girl. Her last boyfriend, who is also her financier in a venture to turn her house into a café, just broke up with her to rekindle a former relationship. Rich (Joseph Marco), on the other hand, is too busy making his coffee farm profitable that his girlfriend of so many years has decided to leave him. Unsurprisingly, they meet under less-than-perfect circumstances. They slowly discover each other’s charms, leading them to exchange their inane quarrels for declarations of love for each other.

The movie has very modest ambitions, aiming mostly to titillate its audience with another iteration of a fairy tale romance. Sadly, despite the smallness of its goals, it fails to consistently entertain. 

Endless chatter

My Rebound Girl thrives in endless chatter. It ends up being quite shrill and lousy.

Gonzaga dominates the picture with a shtick that becomes tiring after a few scenes that obviously exploit her energetic persona. Marco doesn’t really come up with anything substantial out of a poorly written role. Dela Cruz doesn’t really do much to explain why the two characters should fall hopelessly in love with each other. They just do, in the most tacked on and mechanical of manners. It is all too convenient to really work.

The movie then masks its obvious shortcomings with easy gimmicks, peppering its staggered scenes of nothing remarkable happening with romantic songs that are easy on the ears, but evokes an obvious desperation to make the movie work. The gimmicks however do not work. They only emphasize how bare the movie is when it comes to communicating the aches and delights of loving and being loved.

Sure, there are some unique details here and there, most apparent of which is the movie’s main conceit of likening romance to coffee-making, with the two very different things bearing the same possibilities for variety, pain, and pleasure. However, the movie never really evolves into anything more substantial than being an erstwhile and often ineffective escape. 

More a chore

My Rebound Girl simply takes too long to make its obvious and uninteresting point. It the movie were a cup of coffee, it is one that has been left untouched for hours, making its consumption more a chore than a luxury. – Rappler.com

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ ‘Tirad Pass.’ Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.