Love-triangle drama misses its mark

ZULUETA, PASCUAL AND GARCIA. All flash, not enough substance.

IT’S HARD to imagine a more attractive stellar screen trio than Dawn Zulueta, Piolo Pascual and Coleen Garcia. Ironically, the appealing actors don’t make a coosome threesome in Gino M. Santos’ “Love Me Tomorrow.”

The film is all flash, not enough substance—and you’ll hardly see sparks flying in this undercooked hybrid of drama and rom-com.

You can sense Zulueta struggling to keep her thespic wits about her as she tries to make sense of the circumstances surrounding the second wind her 50-year-old character, Christy Gonzales, is experiencing.

Christy suddenly finds herself juggling an increasingly successful career as a fashion designer and swooning over a new lease on her romantic life, by way of her gorgeous but impulsive younger beau, JC Rivera (Pascual).

To provide conflict for Christy and JC’s Happily Ever After, there’s Janine (Garcia), JC’s heretofore constant (and much younger) “playmate,” who wants to turn their occasional rolls in the hay into a trip—to the altar!

Coleen’s characterization is grossly compromised by her underwritten role. For much of the movie, Janine is utilized to steer the story in convoluted and long-winding directions, so she’s often seen and heard spewing the perfunctorily catty lines screen vixens are expected to intone—with fangs, claws and venomous flair unleashed.

To be fair, the pretty actress doesn’t do badly—but, her character’s backstory can’t coherently explain why someone as lovely and intelligent as she would allow herself to get stuck in potentially damaging situations—or, in Coleen’s case, this ponderous film.

Piolo is dreamy—and it makes sense why cougars and nubile felines alike would fall head over heels in love with him.

But, his handsome face and six-pack abs notwithstanding, the character he essays is nothing but a spiteful guy who thinks there’s nothing wrong with narcissism and perpetual mugging when he’s not turning on his charm to get what he wants.

Piolo may no longer be the phlegmatic actor he used to be some film seasons ago, but he nonetheless fails to turn JC into a character viewers can fully empathize with.

Another crucial element in casting that goes against Piolo’s enthusiastic portrayal is his lack of chemistry with both Dawn and Coleen. You can’t expect the audience to connect with three actors who can’t connect —with each other!

Dawn does her best to make her dramatic sequences and rom-com moments work, but her scenes showing age-inappropriate and cringe-worthy flirtations with Piolo on the beach are a little hard to take.

Ditto for her nights on the town with her boytoy-chasing, Botox-loving amigas, who are too long in the tooth to be seen grooving to EDM (electronic dance music).

If you’re looking for insights and lessons from their colorful, cartoony lives, it’s best to look elsewhere.

Shortly after its appealingly breezy start, Santos’ meandering movie quickly goes downhill and doesn’t recover—until a pair of stellar cameos provides a jolt of welcome adrenaline in the epilogue’s obligatory happy ending. Unfortunately, stellar cameos don’t a good movie make.

In fact, we left the theater wondering if we were watching the same movie that the Cinema Evaluation Board deemed worthy of a B-grade.

Dawn, Piolo and Coleen deserve to play roles that aren’t as aimless and shallow as the ones they portray here.