Movie Review: I Am Not Big Bird Gets Rough but Ends with Big Laughs

(SPOT.ph) I Am Not Big Bird takes a little while to get going. Its first act, which mainly takes place in the Philippines, establishes a few main facts: Luis Carpio, played by Enrique Gil, is not very well endowed, and his insecurities have led his long term girlfriend to reject his marriage proposal. The film also takes pains to present a certain dynamic with his two friends, played by Red Ollero, the standup comic, and Nikko Natividad. He doesn’t really hang out with them often, and will only really do so when he’s going through something. 

It is on Luis' behest that the friends all travel to Thailand together, with the vague aim of becoming ‘a bigger man.’ And it is in Thailand that a third fact is established: Luis looks exactly like Big Bird, a porn star big in the nineties known for being enormously endowed. While the three friends were just really looking for a good time, they quickly find themselves at the center of a maelstrom involving Japanese drug dealers, porn producers, and a Thai public that seems to have very mixed opinions on the long-missing porn star.

The Silly Charm of I Am Not Big Bird

The sillier the story gets, the stronger the whole thing is. The movie does have some cogent things to say about how masculine ideals might be keeping men from just being happy, but this is also a movie where there is a character who shoots bananas from their private parts like a machine gun. What’s great is that it all feels like it’s cut from the same cloth, neither part undermining the other. Its heart, inexplicably, is in the same place as its penis. It will play a pivotal argument between the friends with just as much phallic comedy as the rest of the movie.

It doesn’t all work, though. The first half feels slow, spending a little too much time on the friends sightseeing in Thailand before letting the actual plot kick in. It feels pretty late in the movie before the characters even discover that Luis looks like Big Bird. There’s a certain roughness to everything, too. Part of I Am Not Big Bird feels like an homage to the comedies of the nineties, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling kind of unpolished. There’s just a lot of B-roll drone shots of Thailand that give the impression the movie isn’t cut as tightly as it could be.

Enrique Gil Looks Like He's Having a Blast

When it works, though, it works. The prickly dynamic between the three leads is fun, especially when they get on each other’s nerves. It just feels like they all understand the assignment, playing three guys who’ve known each other forever, and are prone to turning off their filters when they’re together. In a movie full of outlandish characters, they do feel like a grounding presence, even if they themselves are kind of ridiculous. Enrique seems to be having a blast, getting to fool around harder than he’s ever done in his career. And that’s good to see.

It’s just kind of great to have a local mainstream film that goes as raunchy as this one does. It’s just a genre we don’t do with great frequency, with sex itself largely sidelined and ghettoized in our current cinema. For all of its ridiculousness, the film actually stands out for being a Filipino film that’s sex-positive. It couches it in the absurd, but this is ultimately a story about a guy who learns to not be so hung up about sex, even if he isn’t very well-hung. It’s a misadventure that leads to the conclusion that maybe sex won’t ruin things, which is a weirdly bold thing to say.