On the Job (Erik Matti) [Archive]

Stay Puft

10-07-2013, 05:03 AM

The ultimate in mixed-reaction-ology.

The premise is a compelling true crime case of an incident in the Philippines involving prisoners being used as hitmen for shady bureaucratic dealings. The setpieces are executed with aplomb. The plotting can get convoluted but the payoff is in how well layered those elements are in the action scenes. There are also some good performances. But the praise ends there, alas.

This is the opposite of genre work like The Major, the Russian crime film I saw at TIFF. Where The Major was lean and focused, On the Job is convoluted and aimless. There is ambition here in terms of how Matti and his screenwriter are attempting to chart corruption at every level of society, from the prisons to the police to the politicians (and I can admire that!), but where the film begins with a unique, culturally specific perspective (the prisoners being used for assassinations), every additional narrative layer (the police who work the case, the politicians who call the hits) spirals the story further into genre cliché, with broad, one dimensional characters and trite moral dramatics (a cop with a heart of gold, a powerful politican who is just protecting his family, yadda yadda yadda). The film quickly stops offering any potential insight and settles for typical genre thrills and an easily digestible, routine story. Both films (this and The Major, I mean) have a similar outcome (where corruption is rampant, doing the right thing is impossible), but yeah, On the Job is just too bloated to land with anything other than a dull thud. The pacing is too limp, the cuts are too clumsy (some shots seem to go on two seconds too long, attempting to provide some texture or details that suggest a world continuing outside of the frame, but when the world is flat and one dimensional, what else is there to see?) and the drama is paint-by-numbers. The ending is nonsense, too.

This all sounds a little more harsh than I want it to, perhaps. I'd say I probably could have still enjoyed it overall if it wasn't for some ugly social attitudes. Characters will exhibit misogynistic and homophobic attitudes, but the film doesn't really challenge anything; these attitudes are reproduced, but never confronted, which says about all that needs to be said about what this film accomplishes.