Sabungero Movie The Cockfighter

“Sabungero” follows the life a middle-class family man named Paco, played brilliantly by Joel Torre, and chronicles his foray into the Game of Kings, from the way it affects his life to the slow, painful struggle for redemption. Torre captures this desperate, and all too familiar, internal conflict with disturbing accuracy, his eyes, in different scenes, expressing hope, anguish, defiance, arrogance and even unrelenting greed.

Weighing down heavily on both his sides are Berting (Edwin Nombre), who blends in perfectly as the cockpit’s “Kristo,” or bet handler, and Badong, a shady gambler played to creepy perfection by Nonie Buencamino. They represent Paco’s light and shadow, the gamecocks creating dust clouds in his head, clashing in that gray area between quitting and pushing through, longing and giving up, stopping cold turkey and justifying one more round.

This fracas is also played out on the cockpit, represented by Tatang, portrayed with a quiet, respectable dignity by Robert Arevalo, and Paco’s eventual nemesis, Congressman. No other actor, it seems, could convincingly play the latter than Leo Martinez. Tatang, the mysterious owner of the “sabungan,” harks to a time when cockfighting was about honesty, camaraderie and sportsmanship; while Congressman symbolizes, well, the cesspool of gambling, commercialism and profiteering it is today.

Caught in the crossfire of Paco’s internal skirmishes are his wife (Maritoni Fernandez), his children (Sid Lucero – whose father, Mark Gil, also makes a cameo appearance — and Lesley Martinez), and his best friend (Ricky Davao). Despite their presence, however, like the gamecocks he handles, Paco slugs it out with his own demons, taking chance after chance, unable to stop his downward spiral into the debt-ridden sabungero stereotype.