This movie really is, as some of the commentators have said, a tour de force of mise en scene - it is shot with a distinctive hand-held camera style, features some powerful performances (most notably by Ian Gamazon as Adam, a secular Muslim American born in the Phillipines), and makes exceptional use of its gritty noir setting of Philippino urban slums. <br /><br />Yet, the movie is ultimately extremely disappointing. Cavite ultimately fails in two interconnected ways. First, as a dramatic story, chiefly because its main character is irredeemably weak (and the vicious, stereotyped anti-gay viewpoint portrayed tacitly builds strength on this weakness). Adam not only fails as a protagonist - he is unable to affect the action in any way throughout the entire film - but as a moral being. He shirks responsibility for his stark moral choices: Ultimately, he is willing to take decisive action to murder a large crowd of innocent people to save his own loved ones - and this miserable character is the only potentially oppositional voice that might at least rhetorically counter the unseen but omniscient and omnipotent "Abu Sayaf" spokesman. As a result, that terrorist mastermind directs every aspect of the film, and the erstwhile protagonist is utterly impotent and, indeed, evil.<br /><br />If Adam fails completely to present an alternative or corrective to the (alleged) Abu Sayaf propaganda, the cinematography seems equally complicit in its support for the terrorist's vague and self-satisfied critique of western society (with its documentary footage of privation and social exclusion). So, the deck is stacked from deuce to ace, and that is why the film so completely fails as a work of drama. <br /><br />But, secondly, this is also why the film fails morally as well. Cavite goes beyond consciousness raising in its vivid presentation of poverty and moves toward a subtle, but deeply corrupt sympathy for "revolutionary" terrorism in the name of "the people". The kindest reading is that, with no effective counterweight to the faceless voice of the Abu Sayaf terrorist, the film falls victim to a sort of Stockholm Syndrome, crossing over completely into the terrorist's view of the world. In fact, at the end, the film really lays its cards on the table in a terrible, facile scene back in the USA, where Adam is shown to be victim of blatant American prejudice because of his religion.<br /><br />Despite its technical achievements, this is an evil movie. It is wrong and it is destructive. By failing to offer an effective alternative to mass murder in the name of social revolution, this movie leaves us with nothing beyond the vague but malicious terrorist viewpoint, without any dramatic or rhetorical attempt at rebuttal. The result is not only bad storytelling, but the nasty suspicion that one has watched an extremely well-shot propaganda video for an hour and twenty minutes. <br /><br />Jeremiah B.C. Axelrod