REVIEW: Biktima

Title: Biktima

Director: RD Alba

Producer: Alba Productions

Distribution: Star Cinema

Date of premiere: September 19, 2012

RD Alba's Biktima is so absurd, so bad, so good, so-so, and so funny. I couldn't contain my laughter while watching this in an almost empty SM theater.

There's really no way to describe the plot easily. Safe to say that it is an overdrawn Maalaala Mo Kaya plot, but with less vision. At least every episode of MMK has a goal, in that it either wants to showcase the acting talent of its featured star or it wants to push a broad advocacy.

Biktima has none of that. 

You could even say that nothing really happens in its one-and-a-half-hour plot. Granted, there's a long-winded story about a  TV reporter named Alice (Angel Aquino) who goes on an assignment to a rebel-infested area, and gets kidnapped for six months. In that time, her family thinks she has died, and so husband Mark (Cesar Montano) pursues a relationship with Sandra (Mercedes Cabral). Sandra also volunteers to look after Mark and Alice's young son, making their romance all the more convenient.

But Alice returns, and Mark welcomes her back. Soon, she learns about Mark and Sandra. She goes ballistic, accusing Sandra of sneaking behind her back, never minding that she has been dead for a fairly long time.

And have I mentioned that she's insane? Apparently, she has had mental issues in the past, and the trauma she incurred from the kidnapping incident supplemented that illness. In the end, she murders her mother-in-law, threatens Sandra with a knife, and manages to put a bullet in Mark's back.

Great dramatic plot, right? 

Wrong. The movie ends with the sweetest possible ending: Alice spends a year in the mental hospital, and gets discharged and reunited with Mark and their young son.

The happy ending makes you wonder why they even bothered. Nothing really changed, and they are back to where their characters are when the film started. Maybe they just need an excuse to kill the mother-in-law.

It's not entirely bad, however. You can say that the plot's ludicrous and senseless, but that's what it makes it so fun.

See, the film is made of plotholes. Plothole after plothole constitutes the movie, that after a while, you refuse to care about its narrative value. 

Just accept that Biktima exists in a universe where kidnappers will abduct a TV journalist without asking for ransom, where a TV journalist previously thought dead gets saved from rebels but does not get plastered all over the news, and where hostages are kept in a cage made of flimsy wood that they don't try to escape out of.

It's a world where more than 20 rebels are needed to gun down one defenseless and obese journalist, where a young kid is allowed to ride in the back of an accelerating open 4wd vehicle, and then asked to use both of her hands not to grasp for her life but to try out a pretty watch.

In sum: don't be so serious when watching Biktima. Have fun. This way, you won't feel like a bad film's victim.

RATING: 2 stars out of 5

SUMMARY: So bad it's good. Plothole driven. Senseless and ludicrous.