December 25, 2025
Twinkle de Guzman (Vice Ganda) was a topnotch pageant coach. When his mother suddenly passed away, she left him with an infant baby boy whom she just informally adopted. Twinkle's career floundered as he raised the boy Angelo (Lucas Andalio) to be a smart student and a talented artist. One day, Twinkle was offered an opportunity to work in Hong Kong Disneyland. He can bring Angelo, but adoption papers need to be legalized.
Popular model Mara de Jesus (Nadine Lustre) just announced on TV that she was engaged to be married to Anton (River Joseph), a son of wealthy parents (Jennifer Sevilla and Robert Ortega). However, their wedding will still be held next year because Mara wanted to first win an elusive beauty title Ms. Uniworld, which she lost 10 years ago because she fainted during the final question (about which she would prioritize between her child or her crown).
This is the second film collaboration of star Vice Ganda and writer-director Jun Lana after last year's "... And the Breadwinner Is," which was also an entry in the MMFF last year. Vice was nominated for Best Actor, but won a Special Jury Prize given "To a performer who has broken the ground and gone out of the familiar comfort zone to prove his growth as an artist and tackle issues relevant to the contemporary society." He does so again this year.
The story had already been told in Filipino films at least two times before. In "Ang Tatay Kong Nanay" (1978, Lino Brocka), Dolphy played a gay beautician who raised the child abandoned by his boyfriend's girlfriend (Marissa Delgado) who later wanted the child back. In "Maalaala Mo Kaya: The Movie" (1994, Olivia Lamasan), Aiko Melendez played a UP student who raised the child abandoned by her cousin (Chin-Chin Gutierrez) who later wanted the child back.
This new film has its own innovations to distinguish it from its predecessors. Unlike the first two, it did not see the need to identify Angelo's father. It also had the cleanest (most idealistic?) final resolution of the three. The documents for legal adoption were given a bigger emphasis here, with social worker Mutya Isidro (Chanda Romero) guiding Twinkle along. We see that a signature of consent from the real mother was required to get the process to proceed. We see that a child at 10 years old is expected to write a statement in his own hand as to which parent he wanted to go with.
Of all three films, it was this current version of the story that gave the child a prolonged harrowing scene of barangay officials trying to violently wrest him away from Twinkle's possession when he refused to give Angelo up. While this was a major acting moment for both Vice and Andalio, I felt it went way off-the-rails over-the-top for what's supposed to be a family film, especially when it ended up with Twinkle brandishing a kitchen knife.
Real-life beauty queens like Chelsea Manalo and Carlene Aguilar cameoed at the very start talking about Twinkle's strict methods to ensure victory. There were scenes where Twinkle challenged Mara to strut the runway while balancing anything from an aquarium to a steaming pan of chop suey. While Dolphy's Coring had his gang of gay friends, Vice's Twinkle had transwomen as her foster family -- Mama M (John Lapus) and younger brother Vince (Esnyr). Twinkle's former rival Ms. J (Iyah Mina) is now Mara's manager and bodyguard.
Nadine Lustre was very good with her dramatic confrontations, but her Mara was not made too sympathetic for us to like her enough. Her answer to the Ms. Uniworld pageant's Q&A portion was quite a twist, albeit too improbable and melodramatic. A group of PBB alumni (Shuvee Entrata, Brent Manalo, Mika Salamanca, Klarisse de Guzman) played minor roles as young people in Twinkle's house. They're mostly there to make more noise in the background to fulfill the dictum that "louder is funnier" in Pinoy comedy.
The crazy comedy gags expected of Vice were only inserted as fantasy sequences showing what he really wanted to do in his head but cannot. This story gave Vice plenty of opportunity to stretch his dramatic acting skills -- a perfect vehicle for him to prove that his citations last year was no fluke. Lucas Andalio (a nephew of Loisa Andalio) makes an impressive impression as the confused child caught in between two mothers, as Nino Muhlach did before. The chemistry between Vice and Andalio make them the team we want to root for. 7/10.
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