FILM REVIEW: Bar Boys

Aside from Legally Blonde, the films about law students in popular culture wear all serious courtroom dramas or thrillers, like 12 Angry Men, To Kill A Mockingbird, and the Tom Cruise-starrer The Firm. And then, there's Kip Oebanda's Bar Boys.

Bar Boys make it a point at the start of the movie that it is going to be a fun ride, with the four principal characters, played by Carlo Aquino, Rocco Nacino, Enzo Pineda, and Kean Cipriano, bonding over a multiplayer computer game while waiting for the results of their exams which would determine whether they would go to law school or not. But alas, the dog eat dog world which churns out would be attorneys spits out one of them early in the game, Kean is out, and the three go on to do their best, despite their different support systems and socioeconomic backgrounds.

The good thing about the film is that it feels like a compact guide on what it is like to be a law student from freshman year to senior year, how will it affect your relationships, and what it means for a family to finally have an attorney. It also makes us take a long, hard look at the dark side of law school, fraternities. 

Unlike colleges, it is pretty hard to forego this kind of connection in law school because in the real world, not everyone has the luck to keep two of their friends by their side when entering law school. One fraternity member in the film even mentioned that fraternity is all they had since most of them are from the province. And this connection also plays a big part in the cruz of the film which brings two of the principal character's principles to a head on collision.

The charm of Bar Boys lies in its ability to know when to move on from a scene and when to linger, the natural chemistry of its leads, and strong support performances especially from Odette Khan, Mike Liwag, Anna Luna, and Mailes Kanapi. Hazel Faith Dela Cruz cameo as the seductive emo law student is so striking that you can't help but wish she had more scenes. 

Bar Boys makes a seemingly boring subject matter charming by not resorting to rhetorics and by laying out the motivations of each character for wanting to be an attorney clearly without resorting to melodrama.