While “You’re Still The One” easily strikes as something appealing and relatable, there is a lot going on in its entirity to completely experience and understand, everything it aims to deliver.
Feeding on the common trope about two people whose being together is made impossible by wrong timing and unfavorable situations, the film assumes an immediate charm, but struggles to sustain it by introducing unnecessary twists and turns that keep drawing its lead characters from resolving the main conflict.
The film follows Jojo (Dennis Trillo) and Elise (Maja Salvador) who were still college students when they first got together. From the get go, the chance of putting these two people in a romantic relationship is as easy as 1,2,3, but the narrative itself keeps it from happening. Right away, it introduces its very first conflict: the overly familiar “di pa ako ready” excuse, prevailing over the fact that both of them are truly in love with each of other.
As it rolls, we learn Jojo and Elise had never let go of that mutual romantic feeling, through the years, but never really had the chance to be officially together. Cut to the present, and they’re still at two totally opposite places.
It’s an unsettling turn to follow, how always one of them becomes ready for the commitment the moment the other isn’t , which leads to feeling like it’s just a cycle that keeps happening again and again. So much, with such repetitive resorts, the film tracks a deteriorating development rather than an onward progress. It’s an intriguing trajectory, one that rises and falls everytime a new conflict is introduced and attempted to be resolved, only it never really gets effectively attended.
This mess further gets worse with lack of convincing resolutions from the characters themselves, whose very developments track the same convoluting path of the rest of the narrative.
Amid all these entangled twists and turns that have never really come into a point of settlement, “You’re Still The One” finds strength from the capacity of the actors playing the lead roles.
Both Salvador and Trillo are able to charm their ways through their roles, highlighting the best of their characters to form a more likeable general impression to the audience. This doesn’t mean they’ve managed to conjure a believable chemistry, but it would be a massive understatement to assess their individual performances as just okay.
Having said all that, “You’re Still The One”, falls to something less impressive than just being relatable. Towards the end, it stumbles hitting the right tone, barely making an evident progression to finally move from all the lows it registered through its path. In the end, after all its exaggerrated drama and unnecessarily too many complications, it concludes to a blandly executed and forgettable climax.
RATING: 6/10 (JE)
