‘TAYA’ was a big Vivamax hit in 2021, definitely boosting the streaming careers of AJ Raval and Angeli Khang. So it’s not surprising that Director Roman Perez Jr. now comes up with “Balik Taya”.

AJ has since lied low for still undisclosed reasons (but which is actually fodder for gossip columnists) and has since admitted her boobs then were fake, thanks to silicone implants which she has since removed.

Angeli made hay while the sun shines and made one hit movie after another. She’s now in “Balik Taya”, but Azi Acosta has taken the place of AJ. Jela Cuenca, who’s also in “Taya”, is now also back in “Balik Taya”.

“Balik Taya” is not at all a sequel to “Taya”, so you don’t have to watch the first movie. It has a new story and new characters, so we don’t know why the title is “Balik Taya”, eh wala naman silang binalikan and even the location is now totally different.

In “Taya”, the lead character played by Sean de Guzman is a lazy student who gets addicted to online gambling and pays dearly for it. This time, the bida is Kiko Estrada as Pip, but he’s not looking for Ate Guy here.

He’s looking for a job in Thailand but it turns out the company which he applied for is non-existent. And he’s not only a victim of such a scam, he also gets badly beaten up and robbed by fellow Filipinos who left him bleeding in the street.

It’s good another Pinay, Jessy (Azi), sees him, takes him to her home and nurses him back to health. Since this is a Vivamax movie, it’s easy to conclude that they would end up in bed. Jessy helps Pip find a job somewhere but when he returns, he’s told that Jessy has been deported back to Manila by immigration authorities.

Pip has fallen in love with her so he returns to Manila to search for her. While watching online gambling, he sees a betting girl with a birthmark on her chest similar to that of Jessy.

So he goes to where she works and learns it’s not really Jessy but Kate (Angeli.) Since this is Vivamax and Kiko is just so irresistible to women, you know they’d also end up in bed.

But it’s not only Kate who falls for Pip but also her boss, Nina (Jela Cuenca, speaking with the phoniest of Chinese accents), and you know that since Kiko is very obliging, they also end up in bed. Nina offers a job to Pip: to be an underground martial arts fighter.

“Balik Taya” is completely different from “Taya”, which ended with Sean de Guzman being killed. Here, Kiko Estrada remains standing until the end and there’s even a hint that he is finally reunited with Azi. Or is it Angeli? Direk Roman wants us to guess and draw our own conclusion.

The Bangkok location is not fully exploited in the film. They just set the first half hour there for a change. If you want a more extensive exposure of Bangkok in a movie, then watch two 007 flicks shot there, “Man with the Golden Gun” and “Tomorrow Never Dies” complete with action -packed chase scenes in its canals.

Of course, the come-on here are the sex scenes and “Taya” looks wilder since Sean de Guzman is more brazen in the bed scenes. Somehow, Kiko seems to be holding back.

Also, there’s an air of unreality in the situations portrayed in the movie. You feel that they’re all just staging it to favor Vivamax subscribers.

You wish the script were better written so we can invest more in the characters who look like they’re just figments of someone’s imagination and not really grounded on reality.

If there would be a third “Taya” movie, we hope they’ll come up with a more well-crafted screenplay with more characters we can empathize with. We hope it will also elicit better emotional pay-off in giving us a better sense of our real world and doesn’t just border on whimsical alchemy or wishful thinking.