Can’t Help Falling In Love Movie Review: Strictly For Diehard Fans Of The Kathniel Love Team

‘CAN’T HELP FALLING IN LOVE’ is strictly for the fans of the Kathniel love team. The movie banks mainly on the charisma of Daniel Padilla and Kathryn Bernardo and there’s no doubt they have so much appeal, especially Daniel whose every move and delivery of his lines never fail to make his hardcore admirers squeal with delight. But not even the ample charms of Daniel (who’s actually the same Daniel in all the movies he does) would be enough to redeem the idiocies in the movie’s script.

The basic premise alone is already hard to take and yet they force it through: Daniel as Dos and Kathryn as Gab meet in a bar, both very drunk, and they ask a mayor (Zanjoe Marudo in a cameo) to marry them. Kathryn is a successful career woman who is engaged to be married to her U.S.-based boyfriend of her six years, Matteo Guidicelli as Jason. Just as she starts preparing for her wedding, she gets a copy of her marriage contract to Daniel by mail. How their marriage was legalized when they didn’t even have the required marriage license is beyond us.

She then desperately asks Daniel to meet with her so he can help her annul their marriage, with the help of a lawyer who looks and acts like more like a comedian than a komiks lawyer like Atorni Agaton. This leads to a series of scenes that strain hard to make us viewers laugh. Kathryn asks Daniel to admit he’s impotent on camera, but a lot of girls show up to testify that he actually satisfied all of them.

To make homosexuality an excuse for annulment, Kathryn pretends she’s in bed with another woman and they’re arrested by cops for allegedly doing porn. When this doesn’t work, she acts like a taong graza in a street corner to prove that she’s psychologically incapacitated and Daniel is nearly hit by a car trying to take a video of her while she's acting like a loony.

All these shenanigans are used for comical and “kilig” purposes, with logic be damned and story credibility thrown away since Kathryn is shown earlier as someone smart and sensible that it seems so far fetched that she’d resort to all these silly, ludicrous and demeaning things.

Their last resort is to look for the male assistant of the mayor who can testify that the wedding is a sham, played by Joross Gamboa. But he suddenly goes missing after the mayor died in a car accident. It turns out he and the later mayor were secret lovers and when they finally track him down in Cebu, he’s already a transwoman.

Then Daniel suddenly collapses and it is revealed that he is suffering from a serious life-threatening medical issue involving aneurysm and, from being a comedy, the movie instantly turns into sudsy drama. At this point, we decide that we can no longer endure the movie’s imbecilic turns of plot and we leave the theater quietly to preserve our sanity.

For you to enjoy this fan movie, you have to be a brain-damaged viewer who does not ask too many questions because of your diehard love for Daniel and Kathryn. So despite our warnings, go watch it as long as you know what you’re getting into. If you’re overly concerned with logic, coherence and plausibility in what you watch, then you can skip it.

We’re sure they will no longer mind this negative review as the movie has been in theaters for three weeks now and, no matter what bad things we write about it, how can you argue with its huge success at the box office? They’ll still be laughing all the way to the bank and they’re not the one to blame but local viewers who do not mind watching this kind of crap.