OK; "W" is pretty awesome. The bad guy commands a 1,000 man army of skinhead biker thugs who occupy a huge prime piece of undeveloped beach real estate, which apparently functions as a hideout somehow. They're all dressed in Mad Max style crazy-guy clothes, and behave like an untouchable bad-ass gang who rule the badlands in a dystopian future. All that sort of clashes with the fact that the rest of the film's universe seems to be set in contemporary Manilla. Well, never mind.
The bad guys' day job is opium smuggling. They divide their downtime between assaulting normal-universe Manilla, and doing calisthenics on their expansive beach estate. Despite them running around all crazy-like in Mad Max couture for the first 3/4 of the film, and regularly having fun with various weapons and pyrotechnics on their "secret" beach compound, the cops can't seem to locate them. Maybe it's because the cops have like 30 employees total, and only one of them is any good at taking on the bad guys. He is the titular agent "W", or, as we find out in the course of the film his full title, and no kidding; "Agent W2"!
Oh yes, do get out your file of IRS jokes for your riffing session.
Well, things do not fill out well for W2 in the first half of the movie. After W2 offs a gang member in self defense, we are treated to the obligatory "your badge and your gun" scene; who could expect anything less? I must say the plot surprised me by going in an unexpected direction during the course of the bad guys messing up W2's honeymoon. I don't want to drop any spoilers, but be prepared to fish out your "short form" jokes from the IRS joke file.
It all comes to a head with W2 leading the cops in an assault (FINALLY!) on the beach "hideout". The skinhead army looks almost impressive in ranks on the beach. They are however, lined up in rows of ten, so it's pretty easy to count that they number around 140; a tad less than 1,000. But again, never mind.
Obviously for this job, some armor is in order. One welding-and-hammering montage later and viola! Agent W2's '75 Camero is now an assault tank! A bit of sheet metal replacing windows is all it takes to fend off the bad guy's (quote) "latest high powered guns", which luckily cannot penetrate the unarmored pieces of the mighty Camero, such as doors, hood, radiator grill, and tires.
The bad guys have a few bad-ass vehicles of their own; my favorite are what seem to be motorcycles crossed with Professor Fate's rocket car from THE GREAT RACE. Yay!
The editing is as choppy as I've seen in other Pinoy films of that era, leaving one wondering if they just never got around to filming certain connecting scenes. Lots of action, and from the look of a few of the sequences, one can easily imagine that one or more stunt person/s may have been seriously injured.
The only thing that could have improved this flick would have been the presence of the great Weng Weng himself. But wait! We do get a least one "prone man firing weapon while sliding on horizontal surface"! Maybe it's a Pilipino thing(?).
Thumbs up from me!
("W Is War" has been released on DVD as "W", and you may have better luck searching for it as such.)
