It's finally here. The drug war film so controversial that even the Palace had to issue a statement before they saw it. On the President's Orders. I actually watched it while eating my breakfast. Oatmeal with a fried egg all chopped up and mixed in. A perfect way to start the day. Coffee too! And not that 3-n-1 junk. Now that I have seen it I want to share my thoughts with you all. Let's get right to the punch:
This documentary film is all lies and propaganda and none of it is true.
To prove this assertion I am going to walk you through this film. Spoilers abound so do watch first.
The documentary was shown on PBS as an episode of the Frontline television program and before the proper film starts we get a thank you to us the viewer and a thanks to various foundations.
The MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Abrams Foundation, Park Foundation, John and Helen Glessner Family Trust, Frontline Journalism Fund, the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, Thomas and Karen Hamilton, and the Bertha Doc Society. If you are not aware that these big monied foundations set agendas and dictate policy then you need to watch this interview with Norman Dodd about how that all works.
Right off the bat we know we are dealing with people who have set an agenda. But what is that agenda? Once again I will lay my cards out and tell you. It is to discredit the PNP.
After hearing a speech from the newly installed Caloocan PNP Chief Modequillo about how he wants to instil discipline in his officers one of the first scenes we see is a this same Chief Modequillo instructing officers on the firing range. He says to them, "Fire one shot and holster." They pull out their guns and then BLAM BLAM BLAM!!! Modequillo screams "Hold fire ***** damn it!!"
"Do you understand one round?"
"Yes, Sir!"
"You say yes sir, yes sir, but then you can't follow instructions!"
Are we supposed to laugh at the contrast between Chief Modequillo promising to instil discipline in his men and these undisciplined PNP officers who, when they are told to unholster their guns and fire one shot, continue firing? Are we supposed to laugh even harder when Chief Modequillo gives them a second chance and someone messes up and he threatens to shoot them?
Do you think that's funny? It's not funny. It is absolutely pathetic and it is only kept in the movie because it makes the PNP look bad. Who's to say they didn't get more discipline as time passed? But we don't see that. Instead we see bumbling officers who can't follow a simple command and their Chief threatening to shoot one of them.
Neither is the scene where the Caloocan Jail Warden tucks his shirt into his underwear as he sings and dances funny.
He's just having a good time before he has to go to work and beat the inmates. Give him a break! Imagine if you had to oversee an overcrowded jail and you had to beat the inmates because as Sgt. Augustin says:
Yes, I hurt the detainees. I give them punishments.
If you don’t spank a child, he will not obey you. In prison you need to act like a gangster.
How would you make it through your day if not by singing and dancing?
It's just a way to make this guy look silly. Look at this scene where the warden brings his weapon to the mess hall table.
Sgt. Augustin points his gun at a man who gets a little sacred and ducks out of the way. Is that funny? There could have been a round in the chamber. The trigger could have accidentally been pulled and someone seriously hurt. You think the jail warden pointing his weapon at some guy in the mess hall is funny? It's not and tell me what value does this scene add to the movie which is supposed to be about the drug war? It only serves to make this man look foolish.
Just before we meet this jail warden we are introduced to the S.O.U. or Special Operations Unit of the Caloocan police who operate directly under Modequillo. Specifically we meet Captain Will Cabrales who is the S.O.U.'s Team Leader.
Like flies on the wall we are privy to this pre-raid conversation between Cabrales and one of his men.
"So this suspect, Jimmy Aussa, is well known in his area. He's been reported as a headache in his area. It's drugs, right?"
"Yeah, but we don't have a search warrant. We know he has drugs, but we don't have a search warrant."
"No, what we do in this case is focus on the gun. Always where there is a gun the drugs will be the second offense. He’s definitely got drugs?"
"He's definitely got drugs. Someone like Jimmy Aussa, sir, if he gets out, he'll keep going back to his old ways. We will have to hunt him again and again. That's why we need to finish him right away."
"No, I asked the chief if we can go overboard, but he said it has to be clean."
Come on man. For one thing we should not be privy to such a private and sensitive conversation. For another....it's just more reason to look down on the PNP. These men are actually discussing how to get around not having a search warrant and one of them is actually advocating taking Jimmy Aussa out! PNP officers advocating murder? It's left in the "documentary" to make the PNP look bad.
How seriously are we supposed to take this documentary anyway when so many reviewers keep commenting on how cinematic it is?
“Cinematic with a capital C”
— BiffBamPop
“It’s a wholly cinematic, sensory experience, with straight-ahead reportage electrified by glaring streetlights and a panicked urban wall of sound; it would make a handsome companion piece to Filipino auteur Brillante Mendoza’s recent “Alpha, the Right to Kill,” a fictionalised Duterte-era action film that aimed for grainy docu-realism as much as Jones and Sarbil’s film trades in more sleekly immersive atmospherics.
Production values here are so dazzlingly high that, for entire sequences at a time, riveted viewers may forget to wonder just how Jones and Sarbil managed to force a camera into the fray. Sarbil, a gifted cameraman who won a cinematography Emmy for his and Jones’s 2017 Frontline episode on Mosul, shoots the nighttime raids with a hot, athletic immediacy that the aforementioned Mendoza (or even Michael Mann) would covet in a fictional context; bodies are silhouetted in the glare of emergency lights, though amid the shadows, we also get close-up glimmers of strained faces on all sides of the law. The idea here is not to aestheticize a human rights crisis, but to show the absurd movie-logic shoot-’em-up that Duterte has allowed the Philippines to become, right down to the “Fury Road”-style death’s-head masks worn by the executors. Populist politics can turn all too easily to popcorn ones; “On the President’s Orders” vividly captures the tipping point.”
— Guy Lodge, Variety
“In this explosive cinematic investigation, directors James Jones and Olivier Sarbil get alarmingly close to the battle for the streets and soul of the Philippines. Their cameras stand before both sides — the victimised slum communities and the police squads blithely executing their countrymen from a perverse moral high ground. The staggering visions of violence, shot with a kinetic slickness and immediacy, are so electrifying that viewers will have to remind themselves: this is happening now, this is real.”
Is On the President's Orders a Hollywood film or is it a slice of real life? You want real life then watch the home videos my parents shot in the 80's on a huge, clunky VHS camcorder. You want a "cinematic, sensory experience" with "dazzlingly high" production values then watch this "documentary" or any other movie from Hollywood like Fury Road or Michael Mann's Thief.
Here's the bottom line: I watched this movie expecting to learn more about the Philippines' drug war and I'll I got were pictures of menacing and bumbling PNP officers. If I wanted that I could have just read the daily news!
Look I am not going to give away the rest of this film. All I will say is it's free to watch and if you have 54 minutes to waste then give it a chance. Breakfast time is as good as any time to watch it. But you should know this Frontline version is truncated because the one which was shown in L.A. was 1 hour, 12 minutes!
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