Mae Cruz Alviar’s “Love or Money” banks on the time-tested Star Cinema formula for glossy rom-coms to generate its instant likability. There’s the star-crossed couple who realizes that their love for each other far outweighs their incompatible traits and conflicting priorities, a forbidden romance framed by the sparkle of a picture-perfect foreign land teeming with flawed, but feisty Filipino migrant workers, a conflict that drives them to a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, and, surprise, an epilogue that allows time to conveniently heal all wounds. Unfortunately, it’s also this string of formulaic elements that quickly weighs it down and gives away the production’s tonally disj…
Keep on reading: ‘Love or Money’: Fleeting thrills in glossy but tonally disjointed Coco-Angelica starrer