I HAVE A CONFESSION to make: I fell asleep in the first few minutes of ‘Beauty and the Bestie,’ so my review might not do the movie justice.

Or maybe I’m wrong. I’d be doing my readers a disservice if I didn’t write anything about it.

The truth is, even if viewers doze off from time to time while the movie plays, they’d still understand the film. It’s predictable, and its premise isn’t new. It’s very Wenn Deramas.

The Jokes

The comedy-bar jokes are the movie’s strength and also its weakness. Vice Ganda’s ‘Beauty’ and his friends poking fun at each other’s physical appearance from time to time is funny, but doing it for the entire film is plain wrong. At first, I burst into laughter. The second time, I still laughed. By the third time, it’s a big joke: you’d question your sanity if you still laughed at the repetitive, shallow jokes about pimples and wigs.

While the movie tries to venture into a wide range of genres, from action to drama to comedy to romance, centered on beauty contests and kidnapping and the like, it failed terribly at its supposed focus: making people laugh and touching their hearts. To borrow a famous line from the world of pageantry today, it is never “a comedy with a heart.”

‘Beauty and the Bestie’ simply lacks heart. It lacks focus. It failed to make people grasp what it was trying to be as a movie in the first place.

JaDine and Coco

The film might have successfully infused ‘kilig’ (that giddy romantic rush) with the beautiful couple James Reid and Nadine Lustre, but it didn’t help the film either. Their scenes are cute, yes, but they can only do so much. They should have given JaDine more scenes, if their spark and prettiness were to be considered, but no, this should be different from the ‘On The Wings of Love’ TV series, right?

I’m a self-confessed Coco Martin fan and I loved him as ‘Ang Probinsyano,’ but putting his ‘Ang Probinsyano’ character in this film was a total mistake.

Overall, ‘Beauty and the Bestie’ is nothing but chopsuey: a little of each character’s TV series.

Could we expect better from Deramas and Vice Ganda moving forward? We hope so.

Verdict: Watch at your own risk
Rating: 3/10 stars