“If played locally, the movie is expected to be a genuine hit as opposed to the yellow production… despite being viewed only by the usual opponents of Rody who have greatly diminished.

Foreign Affairs Secretary and part-time film critic Teddy Boy Locsin Jr. seems to have found the antithesis to the American production “On the President’s Orders,” which was a demonization of the war on drugs, through a Hong Kong film that thus far has earned $200 million since its release last July.

In a tweet, Locsin noted that President Rody Duterte is the superhero icon for the fight against drugs in the thriller “The White Storm 2 — Drug Lords” starring superstar Andy Lau who portrays a man who rises from petty crime to riches and “dedicates himself to, yes, Duterte’s war against drugs.”

The movie has scenes of Rody saying, “I will not stop until every pusher and dealer is dead.” And “All it takes is one drug addict to destroy a family.”

The plot of the movie, Locsin narrates, was that the hero went to the Philippines to donate tens of millions of dollars to Duterte’s war on drugs after his drug-addicted son died.

In contrast to the yellow documentary that capitalizes on the worn-out assertion of human rights abuses in Rody’s anti-narcotics drive, the HK film was an honest-to-goodness situationer of the drug problem not only in the Philippines but in the region as a whole.

Some of those who saw the movie confessed that it was obviously inspired by “the President of Philippines.”

Lau’s character, for instance, vowed to eradicate drugs and offer a million dollars to anyone who can take down HK’s largest drug lord, played by another famous Cantonese actor, Louis Koo.

“Similar to Andy’s character, Duterte harbors hatred towards drugs and created policies to eliminate drugs in the Philippines,” according to one film critic.

Sean Gilman, a HK-based columnist who critiques contemporary Chinese cinema wrote, “Twenty minutes into ‘The White Storm 2,’ one of the biggest movie stars in the world, Andy Lau, is shown in a detention facility for drug addicts in Manila. Looking strikingly like the horrifying conditions under which the United States is housing refugees at its borders, Lau nods approvingly as a Filipino police officer describes the anti-drug war led by his nation’s president, Rodrigo Duterte.”

He even offered that the movie was “a striking bit of propaganda, or at least it would be in the hands of a director other than Herman Yau, among the most outspoken and consistent opponents of authoritarianism in mainstream Chinese language cinema.”

The movie was also well received in China. “When the People’s Republic canceled the release of the World War II epic ‘The Eight-Hundred’ a couple of weeks ago (rumor has it because the film, in hewing to historical reality, showed Kuomintang soldiers in too heroic a light), they pushed ‘The White Storm 2’ into its place, where it has proven to be a big hit on Chinese screens,” Gilman indicated.

The expert on Chinese films noted that the Lau starrer’s successful run in China was a feat in itself.

“It would seem to me extremely unlikely for a director who just recently earned a PhD with a dissertation on the history of film censorship in Hong Kong and China to have simply made a piece of authoritarian propaganda. Instead, Yau knows exactly how to get his subversive films approved by what should be a hostile government,” Gilman acknowledged.

The movie if played locally is expected to be a genuine hit as opposed to the yellow production that even had an immediate sequel, “The Nightcrawlers,” despite being viewed only by the usual opponents of Rody who have greatly diminished. Just ask the Otso Diretso bets who learned the painful way during the recently held polls who gets true support from Filipinos.

The two expensive anti-Rody demonization flicks crashed despite being aired free through public television channels in the United States.

The HK movie outfit apparently has a good sense of subject and plot, which is the true state of the drug problem in Asia, that would hit it big at the tills.

Such perspective only needed a candid assessment of what’s really happening without the yellow blinders.