Stellar comeback bid compromised by ‘hyper’ comedic style

VETS Maricel Soriano and Eugene Domingo had to “blend” with flick’s shrill and cartoon-y proceedings.

Returning stars do their best to work with a proven hit-making team to come up with a successful production. Thus, for her comeback bid, veteran luminary Maricel Soriano teamed up with Wenn V. Deramas and his group, plus costar Eugene Domingo, to delight fans with “Momzillas.”

Alas, despite everyone’s best efforts, the production fails to showcase Maricel in a sufficiently agreeable and genuinely funny fashion, so the outcome of her bid for renewed and “updated” film-TV stardom is an iffy proposition.

What seems to be the problem? Deramas’ flick is so determined to excite and delight viewers that it amps up its action and volume to overly-charged, hectic, cartoon-y and hysterical heights—and thus comes off as too strident and unfocused, and simply much too much.

This is a comedic “style” that has resulted in some commercial hits for the frenetic filmmaker, but fails to agreeably come together here.

Another brittle bone of contention is the movie’s plotting, which is predictable and sketchy, to the point of gauntness:

Billy Crawford and Andi Eigenmann are in love and want to get married, but their respective “crazy” moms, Maricel and Eugene, soon discover that they shared Eugene’s faithless husband once upon a time, so the wedding is definitely off, nada, zilch, kaput!

But the feuding moms still show up at a yacht party, the vessel sinks in a storm at sea, and Eugene and Maricel find themselves marooned on an alleged uninhabited island, where they have to learn to patch up their differences and work together in order to survive.

Additional putative complication: Their children no longer love each other, having seen one another’s character flaws, so their moms have to stage a fake “event” to force them to come together again, but it goes awry.

Fear not, that final complication is ironed out before the flick’s final fade—but, by that time, we feel too overly stressed and “sensorily assaulted” (visually and aurally) to care all that much how the unfocused storytelling will ultimately resolve itself.

Despite her agreeing to play an adult man’s mother, Maricel didn’t sufficiently transcend her overly hectic and perky comedic performance style of yore, so her comeback bid wasn’t distinctive enough.

As for Eugene, she can usually “survive” and hold her own in most productions, but she, too, fails to come up with a focused and empathetic portrayal in this one—probably because she felt she had to “blend” with this flick’s shrill and cartoon-y proceedings.

If experienced stars like Maricel and Eugene were confounded by this production, you can imagine how skittishly relative newbies Billy and Andi fared.

In particular, Andi was often simply out of it, just saying her lines and going through the thespic motions, unable to get a clear handle and angle on her assigned character.

On the plus side, this production’s attempts at combining live action and animation were creditable, and so was its handling of its “storm at sea” sequence. But, the movie’s generally strident and “hyper” comedic style overwhelmed its more focused elements.

The film also had too many incidental and supporting players to efficiently handle—minor comics who cluttered up the background in the production’s effort to make its “big” scenes look entertainingly “busy” and “madcap.”

Alas, the resulting “character clutter” only added to the movie’s lack of focus, as some of the “colorful” bit players did their “worst” to get noticed.