Janella Salvador in “My Fairy Tail Love Story”
We don’t expect every film to be Oscar-worthy, because each genre has its reason for being.
But, even if it’s just intended to entertain its target audience or is devoid of lofty cinematic ambitions, we expect it to be coherent, logical or intelligibly told—because even the “suspension of disbelief” requires a grain of truth to work.
“My Fairy Tail Love Story” has quotable insights (“Between love at first sight and happily ever after is reality”; “You fall in love with the person, not the gender”), but the rest of the movie is frothy and fizzy hogwash. It banks on a fascinating premise that fails to fulfill its fascinating promise.
Bond that binds
Perci Intalan’s rom-com is about a mermaid and the omnipresent syokoy in her life.
While the film, about the bond that binds bratty teenager Chantel (Janella Salvador) and her lovestruck best friend Noah (Elmo Magalona), has its funny moments (thanks to the self-deprecating humor of Kiray), its inherent viewability quickly dissipates as soon as it takes logic out of the cinematic equation.
With the help of the incessantly lethargic Noah, the maarte teenager must overturn the curse that turns her into a mermaid—who sings all her lines when she’s scared or anxious. She hopes to get her emancipatory “true love’s kiss” from charming new guy DJ Ethan (Kiko Estrada), whom she once saved from imminent harm.
Janella and Elmo look good together, but it’s a spark-free tandem that is compromised further by phlegmatic Elmo’s inability to show more than one kind of emotion. And it doesn’t help that Kiko looks ill at ease in the cool-as-a-cucumber role assigned to him.
Steely pipes
As for Janella, the girl has steely pipes that are injudiciously and hastily utilized.
When she delivers her dialogue in a sing-song manner, she inexplicably repeats the same lines and sings them with no rhyme or melodic reason.
Moreover, her improvisational trills are sometimes too shrill, which makes her singing more destructive (to the eardrums) than delightful.
Will Chantel find herself locking lips with Ethan, or will she end up in Noah’s reliable arms? Care to make a guess?