Not up to the challenge

DANIEL Matsunaga and Jasmine Curtis-Smith faltered in rom-com.

TV5’s recent TV movie, “The Replacement Bride,” entrusted its two lead roles to the relatively inexperienced Jasmine Curtis-Smith and Daniel Matsunaga. The channel’s readiness to give big breaks to new talents is commendable, but the two tyros weren’t up to the challenge, so the entire production suffered from their insufficiency, more’s the pity.

In the future, TV5 should make doubly sure that it places its trust in newcomers who aren’t just fresh and eager, but will actually deliver the thespic goods required.

In the TV movie, Jasmine played a young woman whose sweetheart ups and marries somebody else. Impulsively, she rushed to stop the wedding from taking place, but ditzily made a big mistake as to the location of the church—and ended up interrupting another couple’s wedding rites!

The poor “unintended” groom, played by Daniel, tried to convince his bride that he didn’t even know Jasmine, but she still left in a huff!

Guilt-ridden over her monumental gaffe, Jasmine promised to help Daniel win his beloved fiancée over again—but, all too predictably, in the course of trying to do so, they ended up liking and then loving each other. Oops, problem!

At the telemovie’s end, of course, Daniel had to loyally choose his original bride-to-be over Jasmine, despite the fact that his heart was no longer in that relationship. One unhappy ending coming up?

How convenient!

Not to worry: Again, all too predictably, Daniel’s fiancée opted to “sacrifice” her love for him, so he and Jasmine could finally, really and truly, get married—how convenient for everybody all around!

While the movie had its share of production and scripting infelicities, its biggest drawback was the weak portrayals turned in by its young leads. To be fair, Jasmine has done well of late in an indie movie (“Transit”); but her performance in this production was back to “starlet” mode—with a lot of feistiness and gung-ho energy, but precious little real creativity and insights shared with the nonplussed viewer. Yes, she’s pretty and eager, but a lead performance in a full-length rom-com needs much more than that!

Daniel does all the more poorly, even if his dashing, leading-man looks are obvious for everyone to see. He began his career locally as a model, and it looks like he hasn’t really learned how to act, banking more on his visual “packaging” and not nearly enough on understanding the character he’s been given to play.

Another limitation is his awkwardness in speaking Filipino, which all “imported” actors should get out of the way before they dare to act in our homegrown productions.

We would have thought that Daniel would have learned from the sad examples provided by the likes of Sam Milby, but it looks like he has to make his own mistakes, in full embarrassing view of the TV audience.

We trust that both Jasmine and Daniel have critiqued their performances, so lessons have been learned that will enable them to do better the next time a big break comes.

It would be even better if other tyro stars and starlets emphatically realize that those big breaks don’t come all that often, so they have to be ready, willing and able to take full advantage of them when they do fall into their laps.

All too often, young comers bank mainly on looks and frisky antics to get producers and fans to notice and dote on them, not realizing that full-blown characterizations, the stuff of which genuine stars are made, demand much more than that!