After a difficult time in Agent training school where his main achievement is to unintentionally reject the amorous advances of fellow student agent Mary Grace and annoy the Agency head Colonel Cynthia Abordo, King (Vhong Navarro) graduates as a Reserve Agent. Mary Grace goes off to study in West Point while King’s career is rescued by his godfather Tony Falcon, the original Agent X44, who stages his own disappearance after an accident (he falls down a manhole) so that King can assume his mantle.
King’s mission is to recover the legendary bolo weapon of the historic icon, King Lapu Lapu, which has been stolen from the Philippines National Museum and is now circulating between three rival gang lords – an Arabian billionaire, a Polynesian princess, and a Japanese yakuza boss all of whom are thematically linked by some business of turning seawater into a gasoline substitute. Helped by Mary Grace who has now turned into a a top agent and a stunning beauty, and his friend the tiny Anton, aka Agent Junior Excalibur, King fights (and occasionally dances) his way through an army of bad guys, shoots across great locations, and wrestles with dangerous bikini-clad babes to retrieve Lapu Lapu’s bolo and Mary Grace’s love.
The classic series of Agent X44 films made by Tagalog Ilang Ilang studios in the 1960s and early 1970s were the Philippines’ most enduring answer to James Bond movies of the time. The films made a big star out of Tony Ferrer who played the lead in his trademark white suit. Some other references that Bernal makes to the period include Anton who could easily be mistaken as a Mini-me rip off but is in fact a homage to Weng Weng, the midget (white suited) spy hero of such Filipino classics as For Your Height Only (1979).
Joyce Bernal’s film isn't exactly a remake but more of a compendium of that phenomenon. And it is less of an update of a formula, or the Philippines 21st century answer to Austin Powers than an inventive, action-packed, creative comedy that confirms Bernal as the finest comedy director working in the Filipino cinema today.
Her version of Agent X44, as played by the masterful Vhong Navarro is not so much a James Bond or Austin Powers, but a Lewisian do-gooder whose cool quiff and white suit makes him something of the Secret Agent’s answer to Elvis Presley. As seen in Bernal’s previous films especially Mr Suave, Navarro has developed an engaging persona as the innocent, flawed hero whose path to success is marked by accident rather than design, but who can rise to the occasion as necessary. He shows his skills in the several action sequences that pepper the film but none finer than the extended climactic scene where King fights in the yakuza headquarters. One particular scene where King and his opponent are manipulated in their combat by black-clad bunraku style puppeteers is destined to become a classic and incidentally reveals Bernal’s comic frame of mind – the revelation of the device is as funny as the device itself.