Today’s quick review: Maria. Once a merciless killer for Ricardo’s (Freddie Webb) drug syndicate, Maria (Cristine Reyes) has put her violent past behind her. She now leads an ordinary life with her loving husband Bert (Guji Lorenzana) and their daughter Min-Min (Johanna Rish Tongcua). But when Kaleb (Ivan Padilla), Ricardo’s son and Maria’s ex-lover, learns that she is alive, he threatens to destroy everything Maria holds dear.
Maria is a Filipino action movie about a reformed assassin who’s forced to kill again. Maria is a by-the-numbers action flick that pits one deadly woman against the soldiers of a drug cartel. In spite of a workable premise and decent stunt work, the movie never establishes a real identity for itself. Maria’s bare-bones plot, weak villain, and limited creativity make it a passable execution of the action formula but nothing more.
Maria is set up as a vehicle for action. The plot is an excuse for Maria to kill Kaleb’s men in bulk. There are feints towards a power struggle within Ricardo’s cartel and shifting political tides in the Philippines, but the movie ignores these potential subplots to focus on the enmity between Kaleb and Maria. The characters are similarly simple. Maria is a fine but unexceptional action heroine, but Kaleb is a flimsy villain with no sense of menace.
These are the same sacrifices that other action movies make, but Maria has comparatively little to justify them. The stunts are handled reasonably well but never impress. The fights are best when Maria is up against a fighter of near-equal skill, rather than waves of cannon fodder, but such moments are rare. The eaction is just fast-paced enough to entertain, but it lacks the variety of weapons, locations, or techniques to set it apart.
Watch Maria when you’re in the mood for a violent action flick and aren’t too particular about quality. Maria gets enough of the basics right to be watchable, but it has little in the way of story, character, or novelty. The end result is a formulaic watch that’s easy to forget. For better execution of a similiar premise, try Colombiana, Bangkok Dangerous, or John Wick. For a more twisted action movie in the same vein, try Everly or Polar.
5.0 out of 10 on IMDB. I give it a 6.0 for modest action wrapped in a generic story.