Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

ON THE JOB (2013)

Hyper-charged, fact-inspired police thriller, familiar in tone, technique & story structure from Hong Kong pics like INFERNAL AFFAIRS/’02 (itself retooled as THE DEPARTED/’06), finds fresh drama from its Filipino settings (in & out of prison) and believability in the moral & political string-pulling corruption playing out behind the violence. The basic idea, ingenious enough for a caper pic, finds a powerful business & militia shadow government hiring long-term prisoners as hitmen enforcers. Secretly released for a job, they return behind bars before anyone’s reported them missing; perfect alibis for perfect kills. But when a smart, well-connected Fed investigator joins forces with a stubborn, old-line cop, they trace the line between all those upper-echelon dots of corruption, and make the most of their opportunity when a newbie executioner botches a hit. Director Erik Matti makes the criss-cross plotting easy to follow (in spite of some murky nighttime lensing from the Red Epic digital camera system), while his well-assorted cast helps maintain narrative clarity (no scorecard needed). And check out those serious Tony Chiu Wai Leung vibes coming from leading-man Piolo Pascual as the handsome, good-guy investigator.

DOUBLE-BILL: An ON THE JOB-2 sequel is in the pipeline for 2015.

No comments: