‘The Assistant' Netflix Movie Review - The Fight Club from Malaysia
After getting imprisoned in a scandal, he wasn’t even involved in, Zafik seeks revenge against his family’s killers while serving time in prison. His search for the truth is accelerated when an unidentified man named Feroz starts to assist him.
Zafik was a bystander when his family got killed, helpless in his dread while rotting in jail for a crime he didn’t commit as he was serving his ten years for the illegal possession of drugs in his car, or should I say after he was framed for that matter. The first thing he had on his mind when he was a free man, was to investigate the nature of the events to draw a conclusive judgment, while he was being helped by his good friend Dato Sam Lee to get back on his feet.
The story had its fair share of twists and turns, but it cannot mask the deficiencies of the plot that is predictable mostly with certain moments of uncertainty which doesn’t seem to affect the stakes of the dangerous game Zafik indulges in it. It is a simple revenge drama, with one or two elements of contrasting facts, that aim to set this apart from others in the genre. The problem? The world had already previously seen such variety that seems to be inspired by the David Fincher classic ‘The Fight Club’ with its lore that comes into play just before halfway through. Despite one or two ‘’off-course development, it doesn’t have the artillery to sustain itself due to apparent plot conveniences that favor our protagonist in every action, and these are far from minor ones.
Aside from Henley Hi as Dato Sam Lee, who was somewhere between average and decent in his role, the movie is let down by abysmal performances from the lead pair of Iedil Alaudin as Zafik, and Hairul Azreen as Feroz. While Hairul plays the physical part of the role decently enough, his acting as a seemingly crazy, yet impulsive force of nature is just straight up annoying due to the poorly written character, and even poor execution. This movie would have possibly saved itself with better acting, however, the issues of the writing go beyond that which is simply hard to ignore. No stage presence effectively holds the attention, it appeared to me that casual things were happening that led from one thing to another. Read More...
