Qwertyman for Monday, January 5, 2026

THIS COMES a bit too late to affect the box office in any way (and it’s not as if anything I write sends people scurrying anywhere), but my wife Beng and I just saw “Manila’s Finest,” and we left much impressed and hopeful for Philippine cinema.

We were out of town for most of the Christmas holidays so we unfortunately got to see only this one film among all of the Metro Manila Film Festival entries. We’d heard good things about the other entries as well, and the fact that “Manila’s Finest” ended up in only third place for Best Picture tells me that we probably missed out on what seems to be a bumper crop. But this isn’t about the MMFF, and I won’t even call it a formal review. It’s more of an emotional reaction to a period and a milieu I happen to have some familiarity with.

“Manila’s Finest” is set in a precinct of the Manila Police from 1969 to 1972, a time of great social and political turmoil. It revolves around the character of Lt. Homer Magtibay (very capably played by Piolo Pascual), a policeman who, despite his flaws, holds on to an old-fashioned sense of duty just when the police service is becoming more politicized in preparation for martial law. He has his hands full with a gang war, only to realize that an even deadlier kind of factionalism is emerging within the force itself, with the rising power of the Philippine Constabulary’s Metropolitan Command, or Metrocom. He also has to deal with trouble at home, as his daughter has become a student activist, the kind that he and his fellow cops have to face with truncheons at the rallies. It dawns on him that it isn’t petty crooks creating chaos in the streets, but the government itself, setting the stage for a crackdown. The movie ends, rather abruptly, on a dire note of warning, hinting at darker times ahead.

The film appealed to me on many levels—the political, the aesthetic, the narrative—but most strongly at the personal, because of the memories it inadvertently brought up. To begin with, my late father Jose Sr. was a cop—or almost. A law student who never finished (like the movie’s Homer), he joined the police academy, in the same batch that produced the future MPD chief James Barbers. The very first picture in my photo album is that of him in police uniform, at parade rest. He never joined the force, perhaps because he married, but he did become an agent for the Motor Vehicles Office, and I remember how impressed I was by his silvery badge when he flashed his wallet open on the jeepney rides we took. That was the kind of thrall in which lawmen at the time were held, or at least I so imagined; they kept the world safe and peaceful, and held evil at bay. (I was too young to understand that my dad’s MVO badge got us free rides.)

I became an activist in college and joined many rallies and street marches; this changed my view of the police, who became fascist pigs, the enforcers of laws for the rich and powerful. During the Diliman Commune of 1971, I held a kwitis that I was supposed to fire if I saw cops approaching on the perimeter of UP’s Area 14. And then something happened that would reverse my perspective: I dropped out of school to find a job. At age eighteen, I finagled my way into becoming a reporter for the Philippines Herald, with zero units in Journalism but with loads of pluck and some writing talent. Seeing what they were dealing with, my editors led by Oskee Villadolid and Joe Pavia decided to give me a crash course in journalism by designating me as General Assignments reporter and making me do the rounds of the beats: police, education, sports, and so on.

Of course, the police beat turned out to be the most challenging and instructive. I was stationed at MPD headquarters on UN Avenue, and put on the graveyard shift that ra through midnight until the morning. When nothing much was going on, we played ping-pong and waited for the fire alarm bell to ring (we ran out only for major fires, like the Family Clinic fire where my job was to count the dead). I kept a little black book of phone numbers where I could ring up hospitals to ask if any major accidents had come in. I learned of a restaurant near the Luneta where killers could be hired for not too much. Being a snot-nosed newbie, I trailed veterans like Ruther Batuigas to avoid being kuryented or bum-steered. I covered murders and suicides, visited the city morgue at three in the morning, and joined cops on their drives along Ermita, checking on vagrants, just like in the movie. It was all heady stuff for an eighteen-year-old.

But what proved to be most stressful was covering demonstrations, now that I was looking at them from the other side of the barricades, parked in a Herald jeep with a driver and photographer. Despite my job, my sympathies strongly remained with the activists, and I dreaded watching the police donning their riot gear and preparing for certain trouble. These being the days long before cellphones and pagers, there was no way I could warn my comrades about what I thought to be snipers or provocateurs or just agents taking their pictures from the rooftop of the Shellborne Hotel near the US Embassy. When the tear gas canisters began flying all I could do myself was duck and run, and I remember visiting some wounded marchers in the ER later. After I covered the funeral of a rebel killed in combat, praising him effusively and playing up the drama, an editor cleaned up my prose and gave me a very dry lesson in reportage: “Omit flowers.”

That’s the kind of treatment director Raymond Red gives his material in “Manila’s Finest.” Nothing is romanticized, no hero left unsullied, except perhaps for the young activists whose further awakening yet lies ahead of them. This well-crafted and well-acted film deserves all its plaudits; the mature Piolo Pascual is outstanding, as is the period production design (except again perhaps for everyone’s new-looking uniform, the bane of period movies, and a few questionable references time-wise—“barangay,” “the New Society,” and Pierre Cardin-style barongs all came after 1972, if memory serves me right). Most of all, “Manila’s Finest” deserves and indeed demands a sequel, into the time of tokhang, when the moral choices facing the police became even starker. But as it is, at least for me, “Manila’s Finest” may indeed have been the finest of its kind this year.

(Image from walphs.com)