Koy, director Jay Chandrasekhar (who also literally phones in a supporting turn as Jo’s smarmy talent agent), and writers Ken Cheng and Kate Angelo break up the afternoon with a ludicrous subplot about Jo’s knucklehead cousin (Eugene Cordero, always a treat), a $15,000 debt and a scramble to unload a pair of legendary boxing gloves owned by the Filipino community’s apparent pride and joy, Manny Pacquiao. In a 96-minute movie, however, that still leaves a lot of room to fill. We know that by the end of all this, the pair will have bonded and accepted that even though they may push our buttons, our loved ones are all we have. And the divorcee balances it all with caring for his kid (internet comic Brandon Wardell, reading his hackneyed lines in such a way as to convey an ironic remove from them), who is named Jo Jr and getting a C- in math, just like in the life of Koy’s real-world son. He’s this close to clinching a network job, but they want him to do an accent he’d rather not, just like in Master of None. He’s a struggling no-name trying to make the jump to legitimate actor, vexed by his past gig as a beer-commercial sloganeer, just like in Party Down. Jo Valencia must return to the Filipino enclave of Daly City, a hop and a skip south of San Francisco, to appease his lovably overbearing immigrant family. What begins as a broad comedy pursuing the workable angle of a My Big Fat Filipino Easter, its cardinal sin topping out at mere corniness, slowly mutates into something more confused, incompetent and arrogant. And yet he’s right at home in a film that never rises past his level, meeting him on the low bar he’s set for himself and eventually beckoning him downward toward intriguing, unexpected forms of badness.
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He appears visibly uncomfortable as alter ego Jo Valencia, grinning with his full count of blindingly white teeth every few seconds as if to reassure us that everything’s all right and we’re all having a good time, like a parent trying to calm a shrieking infant in an airport. The challenge of carrying a whole movie, put to an actor whose last credit was a bit part as Vladimir Lenin in 2019’s possibly nonexistent Anastasia: Once Upon a Time, goes a way toward explaining the overall vibe that this substandard product shouldn’t have passed Universal’s quality control.
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