An ex-assassin tries to leave her dark past behind until a power-hungry gang targets her and her family, forcing her to summon her killer instincts.
One of the latest films added to Netflix's roster is Maria, a Filipino film directed by Pedring Lopez and starring Cristine Reyes, Ronnie Lazaro, KC Montero, Germaine De Leon, and Freddie Webb. I suppose that technically makes this a foreign-language film due to what I am assuming is Taglish being spoken onscreen (due to the highly multilingual nature of the Philippines, code-switching is common between the native Tagalog and English tongues). So if you aren't Filipino, subtitles are a must!
It's safe to say that Maria has been influenced by the like of John Wick and The Punisher, especially when it comes to using an especially traumatic experience to give the protagonist carte blanche to do whatever they want without any consequences or questioning their status as a good person. That is all fine and good, but the success of the film does still rely on great action scenes and a coherent direction for the film, and on those aspects, it falls short.
To be truthful, it falls short of brilliance on pretty much every rateable category. That isn't to say the film is necessarily bad, but there are certainly many areas that the film could improve on. I'll come back to the negative aspects later. For now, let's talk about the good bits.
It's nice to see a strong female protagonist in a big film, and Cristine Reyes does not disappoint when it comes to the action scenes. While the film takes nearly half of its runtime setting everything up (John Wick does it in under 17 minutes), the fight choreography and integration of environmental elements into fight scenes are exceptional at times. There is quite a bit of variation in fighting styles and in enemy skills too, which does help break up what could otherwise become monotonous and tiresome. I also enjoyed the cinematography and colour palette of the nighttime shoots, with some great angles, definition, and vivid colours.
While many of the fight scenes were great, the one-on-one fights were quite inconsistent. Sometimes she could snap an arm or neck with ease, other times she may spend five minutes wrestling (and it's usually with a woman). It's peculiar, but the woman vs. woman fights really just didn't have the same ferocity that the man vs. woman fights did. You felt like they were pulling their punches and trying to stretch out the runtime. Whether that was the intention or not, the audience shouldn't be able to feel that.
That "stretching out" leads into the next issue; Maria had no countdowns. It's quite well-known that if you want to build tension in something, add a timer of sorts. A deadline. A time that things need to be done. None of that happens here. Our protagonist takes down a bunch of enemies, and then disappears to drink, shower, and rest, before putting on a nice dress, applying her eyeliner, and hitting the next place with no indication of where the intel comes from. It doesn't feel like a race against the clock to get vengeance, it feels almost like a job, and that starts to diminish that carte blanche that the audience gave halfway through the film.
In what I found to be an interesting direction, the antagonists get a lot of screentime. By a lot, I mean more than the protagonist gets. This could work really well to develop them as really bad people and having the opportunity to show how their business is operating. What we get though, is a collection of "villain" scenes barely strung together by a storyline that is just about how much they dislike each other. Despite the excessive screentime, we end up with a number of characters and story arcs that never get a payoff. While the film hints at a sequel, you still expect a mention to the status of these open arcs, not just having them dropped without warning.
The worst thing of all--and I hate to compare it to John Wick again, but it was a similar issue that they had--was the final battle. The big epic showdown that was being built up throughout the movie, ended up being incredibly disappointing. Again, there was some nice choreography, but it paled in comparison to earlier fights and felt like they ran out of budget and choreography ideas towards the end. It didn't leave you with the satisfaction that you wanted.
Now that I've said all of my nit-picky bits, let it be known that I did enjoy this film. The traumatic event did suitably set up the revenge-mode, and the action did carry the film for the most part. The villains' story arcs ended up being a distraction especially when the focus was constantly switching between the protagonist and antagonists. It entertained me, and I loved seeing a woman in the role of kicking ass. I would have preferred a more coherent plot and some more time-critical events, but the choreography makes this worth a watch.