The Trigonal: Fight for Justice (2018)

The Trigonal: Fight for Justice (2018)

Starring: Ian Ignacio, Rhian Ramos, Sarah Chang, Gus Liem, Monsour Del Rosario, Paul Allica, Christian Vasquez, Jeffrey Quizon, Vincent Soberano
Director: Vincent Soberano
Action Director: Sarah Chang

 

I wonder if movies like this and Maria are signs that Filipino genre cinema is due for a mainstream comeback. That would certainly be encouraging, considering that the Thai revolution died with Panna Rittikrai and Tony Jaa mainly just takes thankless roles in Hollywood and Hong Kong movies now. Indonesian cinema seemed poised for greatness, but Gareth Evans, who started it with Merantau and The Raid films, has now moved past that phase while actor Iko Uwais, like Tony Jaa, seems to be cast in mediocre Western projects.

Actually, Filipino cinema is a complex creature. There have been several “strains” of cinema over the decades. One would be Tagalog cinema, which has been around the longest. Then, around the 50s and 60s, there shot up a parallel industry whose business model consisted of making genre and exploitation films for international consumption. These included horror movies, like the infamous “Blood Island” movies and Terror is a Man (1958); martial arts movies, like T.N.T. Jackson and some of Ron Marchini’s films; “women in prison” fare; and even sci-fi adventures starring people like Patrick Wayne. Roger Corman often found himself producing movies in the Philippines, often alongside his opposite number there, Cirio H. Santiago.

In the 1990s, the Philippines became the place for once-bankable Hong Kong action stars to make movies and pay the bills. This included Shaw Brothers actor Philip Ko Fei, Cynthia Khan, Yuen Biao, and Yukari Oshima, the latter of whom went by “Cynthia Luster” there. In fact, Miss Oshima has a huge following in the Philippines to this very day, as evidenced by a FB group consisting of mainly Filipino people (many of whom are younger than yours truly). Concurrently, with the stateside success of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal, Roger Corman and Cirio Santiago also kept making martial arts movies there in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including a plethora of films starring Jerry Trimble. As the 1990s drew to a close, Filipino cinema largely fell off the map. And this is where movies like The Trigonal come in.

The movie tells the story of Jacob Casa (BuyBust’s Ian Ignacio) an MMA fighter—he usually refers to himself as a karate master—with a dojo in the Philippines. His wife, Annie (the beautiful Rhian Ramos), has recently announced her pregnancy and Jacob is sincerely overjoyed at the prospect of becoming a father. But any chance of nine months of blissful baby preparation is flushed down the toilet by a number of problems. For one, as popular as the dojo seems to be, it isn’t making enough money to pay the bills, including the initial loan that was taken out to open it. Moreover, Annie is growing increasingly weary with her hubby’s attempts to complement his income with professional bouts, especially now that fatherhood is on the horizon.

Those issues, however, pale in comparison with what’s to come. Urban legends in the martial arts community have floated of a tournament known as “The Trigonal,” a no-holds barred, fight to death series of matches for only the most elite fighters in the world. Well, one day some Filipino gangbanger types led by Allen (Christian Vasquez, who overacts so miserably he threatens to sink the entire production) show up at the dojo with an invitation to The Trigonal. Before Jacob has a chance to think over the proposition, Annie kicks the men out of the dojo. This, my friends, is where things go south.

When Allen reports his failure to his boss, the elusive drug lord Henry Tan (Gus Liem), Allen gets such a chewing out that he returns to town madder than hell. So, he and his flunkies show up at Jacob’s dojo while the latter is having drinks with one of Tan’s Jezebels and beat his assistant instructor Dodoy (Jeffrey Quizon) to death. Unfortunately for Annie, she’s also at the dojo and gets herself raped and beaten for her troubles. They also leave his school in shambles, but that’s really the least of Casa’s problems, isn’t it?

Jacob initially doesn’t know that Allen is behind the attack—and that he wasn’t working on Tan’s orders when he did—but the chance to make a million dollars American is enough to convince him to participate in the elimination round. After all, he now has his debts and his wife’s medical bills to consider. He finds out that Tan’s specialty is a super-steroid called “Green Dragon” and that most of the participants in the elimination round are hopped up on the stuff. What he doesn’t know is that Tan has prepared an even stronger new drug, “Buddha Gold,” and that the Trigonal is less a tournament and more of drug exhibition show for potential buyers and dealers.

Most commentaries of this movie compare it to 80s and early 90s martial arts films, like Kickboxer and Bloodsport. In a lot of ways, that is apt. The Filipino setting of the tournament brings to mind the 1995 Albert Pyun film Heatseeker, which was also set there. The use of weapons in the tournament brings to mind rip-offs of those films, like American Samurai and Shootfighter. The fact that the founder of the tournament of is a drug dealer with his own private island is very much Mr. Han of Enter of the Dragon.

Sadly, the film also mimics Enter the Dragon in that the tournament has no sensical structure to it. I can understand the preliminary round in order to enter the Trigonal itself. But the Trigonal consists of four parallel matches between an “outside” fighter and one of Tan’s fighters. No quarterfinals. No semi-finals. Just four separate matches. That wouldn’t be a problem, but then how do you determine the champion? The movie says that the champion will walk home with a million-dollar prize…so if all four of the incoming fighters won their respective matches, how do you determine the winner? In theory, you would do semi-finals and then a final bout. Here, two incoming fighters win their respective matches, but Jacob is declared the champion. What? And the other guy?

The action was choreographed by Chinese-American wushu stylist Sarah Chang, who shows up as a Chinese kung fu expert who assists Jacob. Chang has spent much of limited career in Asia, mainly focusing her work in the Philippines and Taiwan. She doubled for Celina Jade in the Mainland Chinese blockbuster Wolf Warrior 2 and is now set to have a role in Scott Adkins’s Accident Man 2. There are not many female fight choreographers there; the only other one I can think of is Shaw Brothers actress Yeung Ching-Ching, who assisted Tony Ching Siu-Tung on the Royal Tramp movies and Legend of the Liquid Sword. So I’m glad to see Chang pave the way for future female action directors.

Unfortunately, her work is almost completely ruined by bad editing and photography. The cinematographer uses mainly medium shots for the action, which is okay for punching, but too close for the footwork. Moreover, the fights are often shot from angles that do the fighters no justice. For example, when a character performs a jumping spin kick, do you want to film it from behind the guy on the receiving end? No, because the guy’s body will obscure the move. But they do that here and quite a lot. Some of the fights suffer from Shaky Cam syndrome, notably an emotionally-charged bar fight between Jacob and Alan.

When you can see the action, it’s pretty much 90s style choreography with MMA ground fighting thrown in for good measure. It is what you might expect from a martial arts movie made in 2018. Director Vincent Soberano, who also plays a policeman, has a fight with a drug chemist that is very close-quarters and economical, like what you might see in The Raid or any modern spy movie. The Trigonal Fights have a weapons round and an open hands round. As a result, we get to see fighters duke it out with kali sticks, knives and double-edged spears. Once again, the weapons choreography is very Hollywood 90s, think American Samurai. There’s a pretty good fight between Choy Li Fut’s Mekeal Turner, playing a Brazilian capoeira stylist, and UFC fighter Li Jingliang during the Trigonal segment. Be on the lookout for Filipino action veteran Monsour del Rosario (Tough Beauty and Sloppy Slop and Lethal Panther 2) as Jacob’s teacher: he gets to disarm and take down some baddies at the climax. I’d suppose that Ian Ignacio’s escrima duel with Australian actor Paul Allica (who trained under a member of Jackie Chan’s Stuntman Association) would be the highlight of the action.

Now that we’ve established that the action is decent, albeit hampered by bad camerawork, how does the rest of the movie fare? Not very well. The dialog is inane, with there being way too many F-bombs in place of anything thoughtful. It gets silly after a while. There is also a bad bit of “tell, not show” where Jacob mentions that Sarah Chang’s character is helping him integrate kung fu into his fighting style, but we never actually see it. Bad writing, folks. The acting ranges from pretty decent to laughably awful, with Christian Vasquez’s scenery-chewing performance as Alan making Yu Rong-Guang’s overacting in My Father is a Hero look restrained in comparison.

The Trigonal: Fight for Justice had the potential to be good, but the script needed another revision, and they needed a Hong Kong team on hand to shoot and edit the fights. I do hope that Sarah Chang goes on to bigger and better things as time passes. Finally, what is up with Filipino movies and their little people? We have a random dwarf show up as one of the fight announcers. Amusingly enough, he gets kicked by a drug-addled Paul Allica at the climax…RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST A DWARF!!!