April 21, 2023
One morning, police officer Leandro Acuba (Jeric Raval) rushed his young son Francis (Apollo Arag) to the hospital because he had a very high fever. He called his wife Melissa (Ina Alegre) who was working in a corporate job in the city. She gets out of the board election they were conducting at that moment and rushed back to see her son.
That same morning, suspended police officer Isidro Ticson (Kiko Estrada) was hanging around the house of his estranged wife Shiela (Christine Bermas). He desperately wanted to talk to her about the possibility of getting back together. However, Shiela was already very burnt by Isid's alcoholism and other serious faults. She never wanted to see him again.
That very same morning, police officer Ryan Villa (Richard Solano) just had a romantic rendezvous with his fiancee Ava (Ada Hermosa). The two were excitedly preparing for their wedding which was set in a week. At 35, Ryan was very close to his mother Lyn (Suzette Ranillo) who owned the pharmacy where Shiela worked as a salesgirl.
The stories of these three cops, who just so happened to work in one precinct in a small town in Oriental Mindoro, under chief of police Philip Mijares (Simon Ibarra), were barely connected with each other. These mundane episodes took unnecessarily too long to tell, the emptiness of the script is severely felt. Of course, being Vivamax, sex scenes had to be randomly included, either present day or flashbacks, to further pad the running time.
Director Reynold Giba was a writing protege of Brillante Mendoza who now wrote and directed his second film after "Bata Pa si Sabel" (2022). "Sapul" is Giba's first film without his mentor's name in the credits with him. Not sure what story the director was trying to tell here, even the so-called twist came from out of nowhere and went nowhere. The violence towards the end was very predictable, again part of the typical Vivamax formula.
Christine Bermas had already proven her worth as an actress so more challenging roles should be given her, not this waste of her time. Kiko Estrada had already played an alcoholic bum before, this is nothing new for him. Jeric Raval gets to have a sex scene with an actress less than half his current age of 47, yet his character was so undercooked. Richard Solano gets to play a good boy for a change this time, but you can see his fate from the get-go. 1/10.
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