‘Crosspoint' can't quite find its target

Japan Times

21-05-2025

Japan isn't known for being friendly to foreign film productions: Even big-budget Hollywood projects with Japan-centric stories are often shot elsewhere due to red tape, among other reasons.
Donie Ordiales, a Filipino director and long-time resident in Japan, nonetheless found the ways and means to film his patchily plotted thriller 'Crosspoint' here and release it in the Philippines late last year. The film was a box-office hit, with the casting of local TV star Carlo Aquino drawing fans.
The story — a washed-up Filipino actor and a broke Japanese businessman team up to capture a creepy serial killer — would seem to lend itself to buddy-movie comedy, but everyone plays it totally straight to occasionally ludicrous effect.
Aquino is Manuel Hidalgo, an actor who was once big in the 1990s but is now hard up for roles and in need of money for the medical bills of his pregnant wife. (Given his boyish looks, he must have been barely out of the cradle when he first rose to stardom a quarter century ago.)
Arriving in Japan, Manuel finds employment as a singer in a Filipino club where his Japanese audience is unaware of his one-time fame. Facing deportation because he is not working with a proper visa, he journeys to a small pub in rural Nagano Prefecture but finds it locked and its Pinoy proprietor nowhere to be found. She is, we already know, dead inside the pub at the hands of a killer (Sho Ikushima), whom Manuel catches a glimpse of as he skulks away. The actor has no idea, however, that this stranger is responsible for the crime.
Later that night, without money for a hotel, he seeks shelter in an izakaya (Japanese pub), where he strikes up a conversation with a businessman, Shigeru Yamaguchi ('Shogun' star Takehiro Hira). Fluent in English, Shigeru commiserates with Manuel's problems and confesses his own: His business is bankrupt and he is deep in debt. Then, Manuel catches a glimpse of a news broadcast about a local murder and realizes he has seen the suspect. Hearing this, Shigeru has a light bulb moment and suggests he and Manuel team up to catch the killer and claim the substantial reward.
Seeing this, rightly, as a harebrained idea, Manuel suggests that they go to the cops instead. But Shigeru is both persistent and persuasive and they embark on their big adventure, the trembly Manuel armed with a baseball bat and the grimly determined Shigeru with a bow and arrows. We're told he's an expert archer, but seeing these two flailing through the woods in the dark, I couldn't help but think of Harry and Lloyd, the bumbling duo from the classic Farrelly brothers' comedy 'Dumb and Dumber.'
When the heroes encounter the killer, the ensuing action scenes generate a dark, chaotic impact, if with the obvious assistance of stunt actors and quick cuts that blur who is doing what to whom.
Action aside, the film is realistic about both the vagaries of show business in the Philippines and the hardscrabble lives many Filipino entertainers lead in Japan, where clubs run by their compatriots often close without warning, leaving their hapless employees in the lurch.
But the story drags in plot developments, such as Shigeru's opposition to the singing career of his talented daughter Mayuko (Kei Kurosawa), reminiscent of a standard-issue family melodrama.
For all its entertaining and insightful moments, 'Crosspoint' is finally at cross purposes to itself.