“Maria” Theatrical Poster

Director: Pedring Lopez
Cast: Cristine Reyes, Germaine De Leon, KC Montero, Guji Lorenzana, Freddie Webb, Jennifer Lee, Cindy Miranda, L.A. Santos, Ronald Moreno, Ronnie Lazaro, Andrea Del Rosario, Johnny Revilla, Sonny Sison
Running Time: 90 min.

By Paul Bramhall

Say what you want about Atomic Blonde, but one thing we do have the 2017 Charlize Theron actioner to thank for, is the resurgence of the female lead action flick. While Hollywood has been looking to recreate the success of David Leitch’s tour de force ever since (Red Sparrow, Peppermint etc.), in the first half of 2019 South East Asia has already served up a double helping of femme fatale action. After displaying her martial arts talents as co-lead in The Rebel and Clash, Vietnam gave us the Veronica Ngo vehicle Furie, and in the Philippines director Pedring Lopez is back with the Cristine Reyes headlining Maria.

Lopez is gradually becoming one of the most distinctive voices for genre cinema in the Philippines. After his 2015 movie Nilalang gained international exposure, thanks largely to its killer combination of a face slicing ancient demon facing off against Japanese AV actress Maria Ozawa, Lopez had lined up his next production to be the Mark Dacascos action vehicle Breach. Scheduling conflicts have meant that Breach has, at the time of writing, yet to get off the ground (which could be a blessing in disguise, since Dacascos hasn’t made a decent action movie in almost 20 years. Here’s hoping John Wick 3 changes that!). In its place, Lopez has directed the found footage horror flick Darkroom, and is now back with his most ambitious production to date, Maria.

In some regards the Philippines has already been ahead of the curve with its female driven action movies, thanks to turns from Anne Curtis in BuyBust and Erich Gonzales in We Will Not Die Tonight, both from 2018. Maria shares both Nilalang and BuyBust’s action director in the form of Sonny Sison, who has been tirelessly working towards his own personal mission of putting Filipino action cinema back on the map, since it’s been decidedly MIA for the last 30 years. While the general opinion on Nilalang was that the action was fun considering what resources the crew was working with, BuyBust proved to be massively polarising with its approach to a more realistic action aesthetic. In that regard, for many fans of action cinema, Maria could well be considered a make or break moment for the appeal of the countries output overseas.

Like Erich Gonzales and Anne Curtis, lead Cristine Reyes is not an action actress by trade, mainly due to the fact that in the Philippines there’s no such thing. A model and actress, Reye’s filmography is entirely dedicated to the types of production that make commercial Filipino filmmaking so safe – saccharine romantic comedies, toothless horrors, and dramas that wouldn’t be out of place on a Sunday afternoon HBO slot. I’d like to comment on a few of them, but I’ve attempted commercial Filipino cinema before, and rarely get past 30 minutes. So as much as Maria will likely be an introduction for international audiences to Reyes, for local audiences it also marks a clear departure from the type of roles she usually plays.

The plot is nothing new – an assassin, the spin here being that it’s a female one, has long since given up her life of killing, and is living under a new name with a husband and child, who know nothing of her past. The husband is involved with a shady politician, and when the assassin’s former crew are hired to kidnap the daughter, they get quite the surprise when it leads them to crossing paths with their old colleague, long assumed dead. Despite the plot, the scenes of Reyes together with her husband and daughter (played by Guji Lorenzana and Johanna Rish Tongcua respectively) at home are everything I’ve come to dread from Filipino cinema. Like a 50’s slice of white-picket Americana, the family playfully bicker about breakfast in a sun kissed kitchen, and a brief spat is resolved by Reyes offering to cook a “special dinner” later on that evening.  It’s torturous to watch.

These scenes are like the movie equivalent of the template happy couple you see in photo frames, before you put in your own, and markedly at odds with the surprising amount of graphic violence that’s on show involving scenes with the bad guys. Snitches are given the steel baseball bat treatment, soldering irons are put where the sun don’t shine, and fingernails are subjected to some nastiness via a pair of pliers. So it almost comes as a relief when the bad guys raid the home of our happy family, and things get flipped on their head in a matter of seconds, when Reyes’s domestic bliss is obliterated in front of her eyes. So sets the titular Maria off on a path of bloody vengeance against the ‘family’ that she used to be a part of, and any thoughts that Lopez’s latest was going to take the safe route are quickly abolished.

The bad guys are a lot of fun to watch. The influence of The Raid 2 is apparent, with the setup of a crime boss and his hereditary successor waiting in the wings. However here the scenario is expanded to include a pair of sons, one played by Ivan Padilla, who is the favoured next in line, but not particularly capable, and the other played by KC Montero, who has a ruthless ambitious streak that puts him at odds with his father. The tension between the pair adds a welcome layer of depth to an otherwise straightforward revenge plot, as do the other supporting characters. The usual head henchman trope is turned on its head to be a pair of henchwomen, played by Jennifer Lee and Cindy Miranda, and the addition of Ronnie Lazaro is a welcome one, playing the retired assassin trainer now running a bar (what is it with assassin trainers running bars when they retire!?), who gets pulled back into the world he left behind.

Really though, Maria sells itself on the promise of action, and to that end, it delivers. Before the credits have even rolled we witness Reyes sneak into a mansion, taking out numerous bodyguards with a karambit blade, and it’s a solid sign of what can be expected. The training Reyes has put in is visibly on show, as is the work by Sonny Sison and the Red Line Action Team. This is probably the best flow and edititing I’ve seen in a Filipino action movie, with each movement and impact executed with purpose, and none of the pulled punches or hesitancy that plagued other recent productions on display. The editing may rely on quick cuts, but it doesn’t hinder the rhythm of the action on display, and it also isn’t afraid to get bloody either.

Action director Sonny Sison had expressed his admiration for the action on display in Korean movies like Oldboy and The Man from Nowhere when I interviewed him in 2017, and the influences of both can be felt in a couple of Maria’s key action beats. One has her take on a stream of attackers in a warehouse that takes place in a makeshift corridor, echoing Choi Man-sik’s infamous hammer hallway fight in Oldboy, and the other takes The Man from Nowhere’s bathroom fight as its template. Pitting Reyes against Jennifer Lee for a knockdown dragout brawl, and dressed to impress, their faceoff ends on a suitably wince worthy note. In an action movie landscape which is dominated with male bathroom fight scenes, it’s taken until 2019 to give us a worthwhile female centred throwdown. The moral of the story? You don’t need urinals to create a great bathroom fight scene.

Sison himself gets in on the action for a rare onscreen appearance in recent years, cameoing as Padilla’s MMA trainer in a sparring match that quickly escalates (look out for the patented Sammo Hung back-kick!). Outside of the bladed action and open handed fights, Maria also crams in a worthy amount of gunplay, featuring pistols to semi-automatic weapons to sniper rifles, who ever thought John Wick would have a rival in the Philippines!? The gun fights are efficiently executed, and I particularly liked how they still played a part in the action even when the bullets ran out, whether it be to club someone in the face or strangle with the strap, small touches like this indicate the amount of thought that’s gone into the action design.

Sure Maria isn’t perfect, the script veers from being incredibly cool (there’s a great line involving Cain and Abel) to incredibly cheesy with reckless abandon, and one fight scene features one of my pet hates – a song plays over it, which serves as a distraction rather than a compliment. But these are minor gripes in what is essentially an 85 minute lean and mean action movie that wastes no time getting down to business, and pulls no punches. I ended my review of Nilalang by saying it showed “plenty of potential for the future of Filipino action cinema.” With Maria, that potential has been realised.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 7.5/10