The film was basically a product of favors: from then-presidential candidate and now-president apparent Noynoy Aquino, his family, and his campaign team, who allowed Santos and his crew the opportunity to shoot the presidential campaign from the inside. As such, it never fully acquires a voice. It relays its message. It is what it is, and no matter how it gathers every vanity in cinema like mixing documentary footage with obvious melodrama, it remains to be at most, a limp and flaccid political statement if not an absolutely helpless failure.
The footage of Aquino's campaign, integrated into the film via Noy's work-in-progress documentary, is nothing more than ornamental. Shot using murky and jerk digital format as opposed to the rest of the film's elegant film cinematography, most probably to emulate the immersive quality filmmaking, the footage is at its best, like when Aquino's discussion on the state of Cebu's power was serendipitously interrupted by a short brown-out and he bounces back with a witty retort, revelatory of some of Aquino's endearing traits. Mostly however, the footage is no different from the thousands of footage that were aired in each and every news channel during campaign season: crowds, motorcades, politicians making promises, celebrities endorsing; with only one difference, Coco Martin, disguised as a journalist, is there. There could be something to say about fact, in the form of Aquino's campaign, and fiction, in the form of the character of Noy interacting with Aquino and his team, interacting seamlessly in the documentary footage, but as it is, everything feels put-on and cosmetic at best.
Thus, Noy is nothing more than a disposable drama that disguises itself with the most current of political flavors to achieve only a appearance of relevance. It tries to walk the talk, juxtaposing a grandly operatic tragedy with the insistent promises of change of Aquino's presidential campaign, but it only succeeds in talking more talk, throwing around mere suggestions of the grey areas of Aquino's campaign without actually creating any pertinent discourse about anything.