Sunday, January 15, 2017

"Extra Service" | MOVIE REVIEW

If you feel like all the ideas you have are absolutely terrible, just remember that, somehow, this movie was given the greenlight. Amazing!



Extra Service is, basically, an action-comedy starring Jessy Mendiola, Coleen Garcia, and Arci Muñoz (otherwise known as all the marketing you'll ever need) that feels like it was written by Vice Ganda and someone who frequents PornHub. That right there should tell you everything you need to know about this movie.


I'm gonna try my best to put this simply, so here it goes:

The story revolves around these three girls who work at a spa but are also part-time supercriminals and are given a mission that turns out to be a test. After they apparently perfect the test, they're picked up by this agency to steal back a bunch of pearls that have gone missing and, from there, we get the unfocused, poorly-paced mess that is Extra Service.

Being the optimist that I am, let's list the good things about this movie first.

To this movie's credit, the three leads did have chemistry with one another and did feel like they went back a long way. Their friendship was believable and actually did lend a lot of gravity to the story when things started to go south - as things usually do in these types of movies - and I bought into it. They're also very attractive women.


I wonder why people went to see this movie.

Now that that's out of the way, let's get right into it.

First of all, this movie has a lot of that annoying, Vice Ganda-type humor (you know, the really loud and in-your-face-type that repeats running gags way too often and has the most random pop-culture references thrown in there) that I really don't like. Instead of making me laugh, it just annoyed me, a lot. It got a couple of chuckles out of me, but that was it. For a movie billed as a comedy, it just didn't work for me.

The puns were on and (mostly) off for me. I say mostly because this movie lacks subtlety. Everything is so in your face, like, for example, the main characters are named Au, Em, and Gee - really.



I will admit, one pun did get a chuckle out of me until the movie started beating me over the head with it. Like, the first couple of times were funny, but the next seven? Come on.

Oh yeah, the acting sucks, too.

Okay, look, these girls are beautiful. I'm not contesting that. Are they talented? I'd like to imagine so, yeah. Good actresses? No, or, at least not in this movie. There were times wherein I felt as if I was watching a commercial. In the opening scene, Jessy Mendiola might as well should've turned to the camera saying, "Astig lang ang gusto ko!"


The all-natural enhancer.

I also generally like Coleen Garcia. In Ex With Benefits, I thought she needed a lot of improvement, but she handled the dramatic scenes really well. In this movie though, she was quite bad, most of the time.

There was this one other character in the movie who, I swear to God, was acting like she was on a Vice Ganda skit.

But the worst actors, I think, were the henchmen-slash-punching bags in the fight scenes. I can accept that the three leads are hardly the most athletic women in the world, but the dudes they were fighting should've at least tried to sell a hit and make them look, you know, legit. The fighting looked like those stupid indie wrestling gifs that occasionally appear on your timeline. 


You know... these?

The camera work and editing is also extremely inconsistent. In the most basic of shots, they would do that weird speed-up trick for the sake of making the scene move along faster. Also, it feels like they switched gear in the middle of shooting the movie, and I say this because the last 5 minutes of the movie didn't feel like a commercial or a TV show and actually had really good cinematography. It's a bit of a shame how the rest of the movie wasn't made the same way, really.

Also, this movie feels like one of those that was intended to be a hard-R but was watered down to PG after the studio realized that they wanted more people in the theaters. I say this because there was a family watching in the theater with me, and they had two very small children with them. Now I could forgive them if they didn't know that the movie was gonna be filled with innuendo and a bunch of other shit that kids their age would hardly understand, but when the poster looks like this...



... that's when I become concerned.

Overall, Extra Service might've been t h i c c af, but besides the hot leads, there was hardly much substance. It wasn't too funny, the action was downright silly, and the acting was garbage. The writing was flat and the plot twist at the end made zero sense. I kinda felt bad about handing it the rating I'm about to give it (I'm so sorry, Mejay), but I really can't say that Extra Service is anything better than a Great Mighty Poo.



I feel like this movie would've been better as a porno - not that I would know.

So, Extra Service? Have you seen... No, you probably haven't. But if you have, let me know what you thought about it and leave a comment. As always, this has been Rafa. Stay classy.

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