‘Extra Service’ review: Unsalvageable mediocrity

There are many kinds of bad films.

There are bad films that rub you the right way, the kind of trash that makes you look at it twice or thrice simply because not everything around it is ugly. There’s some redeeming value that makes its ugliness a thing of sublime beauty. 

Then there’s the type of rubbish that is just unsalvageable, a mistake from every angle, an unadorned mishap.

Previous work

Chris Martinez’s Here Comes the Bride (2010) belongs to the former. The movie exaggerates the body swap trope, multiplying it to cover characters of various ages, professions, sexual orientations, and social statuses only to reveal a world where fantasy trumps reality. The film is hilarious and unabashed in its display of brash stereotypes, but deep beneath its trashy trappings is a resounding message on the aches of diversity. 

Randolph Longjas’ Ang Turkey Man Ay Pabo Rin (2013), written by Alpha Habon, also belongs to the former. The movie can easily be viewed as a comedy whose humor is done at the expense of reducing the interracial marriages to a laughable cliché. However, it’s not. Amid all the seemingly insensitive jokes is an uplifting portrayal of romantics whose stark differences in skin color, culture, and grasp of the English language are what unites them. 

Extra Service, directed by Martinez from a story and screenplay written also by Habon, unfortunately belongs to the latter.  

The concept is golden, both as a punchline and a springboard for discourse. Three sexy masseuses, played by Jessy Mendiola, Arci Muñoz, and Coleen Garcia, are actually secret agents for the government, tasked to recover treasures with their special skills and talents. Sadly, the movie never really rises above the concept. It remains grounded on nonsense all throughout, satisfied with spilling inanity after inanity with no clear purpose and direction. 

Where it went wrong

Extra Service just doesn’t work. 

It is a hodgepodge of mistakes and vices, the most glaring of which is laziness. The movie goes for campiness, for the elusive humor of everything going wrong but still turning out to be fun and entertaining. It all backfires. The movie is just a string of awfully conceived and crafted scenes and sequences that don’t amount to anything substantial. If the bad direction is done on purpose, then the purpose has been lost in the movie’s maze of mediocrity.

The movie is also very dully acted, with Mendiola, Muñoz, and Garcia having very little chemistry with each other. They can only ape sexiness, given that the movie is never brave enough to stretch the limits of raunchiness. It is all painfully juvenile, with Martinez struggling to make any real meaning out of all the vapid foolishness that Habon has in spades. 

There is just no reason behind Carmi Martin trying to be funny with her heavily accented Tagalog, or Enzo Pineda playing mute, or Janus del Prado acting flamboyantly gay. It is excessive in throwing stereotype after stereotype but it never justifies them. The movie only ends up being grossly insensitive, all for the sake of fun, which wasn’t achieved in the first place.

Half-baked 

Everything is just half-baked. 

There are no real pleasures here. It just leaves audiences wondering why the movie even exists at all. Now that’s bad. – 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.