The concept for "Cavite" is not exactly new, as the storyline has been worked up before in at least one recent mainstream Hollywood movie.<br /><br />The concept is simple and exciting: an adult man who is from the Philippines has been living and working in the U.S. He gets a call to inform him that he's needed, urgently, at home. On the way out of town he's beset by an emotional crisis with his Stateside girlfriend, which he tries to resolve from a telephone in the airport.<br /><br />Right there I knew I was in trouble. The audio recording in this movie, at least as presented on DVD, is spotted with incomprehensible moments. The "trouble with his girl" sub-text is an important one, or it would not have been included in this briskly paced, and well-photographed story. It reoccurs at the end of the movie but only as an afterthought. There's a scene with the girlfriend talking, being very cold and cruel, and the main character is a wearing a mask of disgust because he is so emotionally spent. He cannot tell her what has happened to him, and she's an airhead, practically speaking.<br /><br />The main character is Adam, and a stranger on a cell phone is his Nemesis, his constant antagonist.<br /><br />Adam is a Muslim man in his mid-30s. The Philippines are overwhelmingly Christian and mostly Roman Catholic, but the substantial Muslim minority there has been raising hell on Mindanao ( and on other islands ), for a century or more. Recently, post-9/11, both domestic anti-terrorist units and U.S. forces have been employed against these Muslim guerrillas and many of them were killed.<br /><br />So, after flying across the Pacific, stopping over in Taipei and then landing in the Philippines, Adam is perplexed when his mother does not meet him at the airport. He soon learns that she cannot because she has been kidnapped by Muslim fanatics. They are threatening to kill her and Adam's sister if he does not cooperate fully.<br /><br />At first he thinks that all they really want is money, because they use him to loot a savings account left behind by his father -- one that holds $ 75,000, a most princely sum -- but eventually he figures out that they want him to be a mule for a terrorist bomb attack.<br /><br />More than half of the film is presented in moving sequences: he's riding in a Jeepney, on a bus, walking, running, taking a tricycle cab and walking some more. The nasty, bitchy fellow on the other end of the cell phone ( that was cleverly inserted into his luggage just before he left the airport on arrival ), alternately harangues him about being a good Muslim and then threatens to murder his mother.<br /><br />The good Muslim is extorting the slacker Muslim into delivering a bomb ... into a Christian church ... by threatening his family. The poor sap has no choice but to comply.<br /><br />The film's author and leading man showed great courage in even wanting to tackle this thorny subject. There are some clever moments in "Cavite". It could have been one of the truly great low-budget independents -- think "Mariachi," here -- if the hectic pace of the film had been reduced at certain points, to allow the viewer to see the size of the dilemma and the pain it causes Adam, and to see him feeling strange in the poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Cavite.<br /><br />Most of the time the cell phone tormentor is speaking Tagalog, or a mixture of Tagalog and English, and the subtitles for that seem to fly by ... meaning, once again, that it is impossible to grasp the size of the problem facing Adam ... because we know after the first four times that the caller says he is going to kill the mother and the sister that this is a bad hombre.<br /><br />Truly, I hate to discourage a young independent from using his many talents and gifts, and there is evidence of them in "Cavite." But then again, I took the time to screen this film on DVD twice, because I wanted to be sure that it wasn't just the herky-jerky camera work which was upsetting me. "Cavite" invites and involves, but it doesn't deliver 'the goods,' at the end, which is really a false ending and then the viewer is forced to endure a flat-out dead end.<br /><br />I think it was Chekov who once wrote, "a gun hung on the wall in Act One must be fired by Act Three". This is the advice the makers of "Cavite" should have heard before they labored so lovingly on it.<br /><br />Great effort and great ideas cannot succeed unless the film has a plot which illustrates the conflict, gives it context, and a resolution. It's only human nature to want an interesting story to have an interesting and meaningful ending. "Cavite" fails in that regard and so all the double-quick camera work and the hectic, panicky pace, goes for naught. <br /><br />One can only hope the principals of this picture will learn something from this, and do two things with their next film -- slow it down to a brisk walk, so that the plot can develop, and hire an actor who can express nuances, and something emotional, besides disgust.