Movie Nation

With its same sex-coupled hero, its shapeshifting “monster” heroine at war with the “small minded,” its score adorned with “The Banana Splits Song,” a street sax player covering “Careless Whisper,” and characters testing a futuristic car sound system with a little “metal” — “Breaking the Law” by Judas Priest, whose lead singer Rob Halford is gay — one could get the idea that the Netflix animated action comedy “Nimona” is kind of Pride Month appropriate.

It’s a fast and sometimes funny fantasy with an anime vibe. Jokes and sight-gags are more important than plot originality or coherence or characters that are little more than caricatures. And it’s a parable, about the “monsters” we’ve always feared, the “unknown” which we fear instinctively and the labeling we seem to need to do by reflex.

Our title character, Nimona, is a smart-mouthed badass, a shapeshifter with a yen for “breaking stuff” and rejecting labels. What…is…she?

“I’m NIMONA!”

“That’s not an answer!” But in the minds of the makers of the movie, it is.

Riz Ahmed voices knight-to-be Ballister, the first commoner ever to be entrusted with protecting this ancient kingdom that has survived, thanks to knights trained by “The Institute,” into the age of hover-cycles and laser-swords.

“Monsters” are what they’re trained to battle, even though nobody goes outside the walls of the city (How do they…eat?) or can remember the last time they saw a monster. The creed handed down to the knights is “never let your guard down.”

Ballister Boldheart will join his partner Ambrosious Goldenloin (subtle as a leather parade) in the knights and take up the sacred duty.

But upon receiving his sword from the queen (Lorraine Toussaint), his sword “goes off” and kills her. He loses his arm in the scuffle to escape. Sir Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang) and the doltish “bro” Sir Thoddeus Surebland, aka “Todd” (Beck Bennett of course) are charged with tracking the “Queen Killer” down.

That’s when this brawling, short-haired pixie Nimona (Chloë Grace Moretz) hears about him, decides he needs a “sidekick,” and pitches in with the “breaking stuff” to help get him out of the jam and maybe “find the real killer.”

Mayhem ensues, as Ballister and his replacement mechanical arm are saved time and again by the shake-shifting dynamo who loves the idea of teaming with “the villain” and who growls “METAL” any time some opportunity for a fight comes up, or a fight that’s just finished is worth relishing.

“She” can be “He” if need be, young or old — whale, gorilla, ostrich, rhino or shark, depending on the situation. Just don’t “label” her and for the love of Gloreth — the founding queen of the kingdom — DON’T call her a “monster.”

The animation is in what is starting to look like a Netflix house style, characters with sharp features, angular edged settings, a distinct “Klaus” color palette. The film began life as a Blue Sky production and Annapurna produced it via outsourced animation houses.

The action’s throughline is simple enough, but the jerky, pieced-together feel of the narrative betrays the half-a-dozen writers given a “story” credit here. It’s kind of nonsensical in ways you usually only see in anime.

It’s got a class consciousness that we figure will be the subtext right up to the point when the gay references begin. The messaging and the jokes are prioritized, with the gay musical cues punctuated by Nimona, having taken the form of a whale, crashing through the knights’ locker room and showers.

“Cold in here?”

Yeah, that penis shrinkage joke will go over the heads of kids. But animated or not, is this really a children’s film? Pretty much.

But positive “don’t judge” messaging and all, it plays like a project more invested in representation and that gay-tolerant subtext than in its actual text. How many kids will give a hoot that George Michael and Rob Halford’s music is referenced and that Rupaul is in the voice cast?

But Moretz makes the title character a wired verbal dervish, all energy and ideas. She’s helped Ballister outfit his “evil lair.”

“Evil lair..Evil LARRY! That’s a totally metal VILLAIN name. You should totally…”

“NEVER gonna happen.”

The various pink critters her character changes into are cute enough sight gags accompanying her almost non-stop banter.

And if kids lose their fear over the color pink watching this, so much the better.

Those are a saving graces for a well-animated film whose middling story might otherwise render it an animated also ran.

Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Chloë Grace Moretz, Riz Ahmed, Frances Conroy, Eugene Lee Yang, Rupaul, Beeck Bennett and Lorraine Toussaint.

Credits: Directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane, scripted by Robert Baird and Lloyd Taylor, based on the novel by ND Stevenson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

One of the gifts or curses of reviewing films for decades is that ability to spot a fiasco in the first few frames.

Some movies start off with promise and lose it. Some stumble but give you the hope that they’ll settle down. But a “fiasco” is a movie that makes one wonder why it was ever made, why those who made ever thought they were capable of faking “competence” in their script, on a set directing a 20-30 day shoot and in the finished product — 97 minutes of screen time.

“The In-Law Gang!” is bad from the get-go, and only gets worse the more “going” it gets through.

A flatly-acted opening scene shows a holiday meal the abruptly ends when the hostess wields the carving knife in a manner that underscores “This is OVER.” No escalation to that moment, no acting signs of heightened emotions and fury. Just a limp direct insult or two and bam, “knives out.”

The credits that follow are the most banal collection of street signs and ariel shots ever to underscore credits. Is Macon, Georgia, the setting? Atlanta?

The Vegas Elvis impersonator wedding chapel scene that marries Cassie (screenwriter and star Jessie Jaylee) and John (Nashawn Kearse) features the impersonator singing “Love Me Tender,” whose copyright usage might have cost more than the movie, and the rustling sounds of fabric against microphone.

That’s great, because much of the movie sounds off-mike. No, most movies don’t merit release with such amateurish blunders in the finished film.

The story is about that marriage, and the war on it waged by the mother of the groom (LaShonda “Lala” Courtney) and her minions.

“Operation: Broken Marriage is in full effect!”

The insults, by one and all, are right to Cassie’s face — at meals, at meetings, around the Christmas tree.

“Let’s hope John is better at picking presents than he is at picking wives!”

Simple as that plot is, the movie wanders all over the place trying to flesh that big fat nothinburger into something that employs a LOT of actors.

Characters wander into the tale without properly identifying themselves or being identified by others.

“Heated” arguments have no heat. Sets look like something whipped up with no time and no money (a restaurant that looks like what it is, a briefly-rented storefront).

And blown lines abound, a common trait shared by many a film meriting the label “fiasco.”

“You act like I was asked to be born…” “Why argue over something of such less importance?”

Does nobody know the mother tongue well enough to know they’ve blown a line and ask for another take? Was it scripted this way?

Is director J. Jesses Smith deaf? Or was this the best take he could get?

The acting’s bad, with only established player Clifton Powell coming off as “belongs on a movie set.”

Our screenwriter/leading lady, her leading man and the hip hop music video director behind the camera would have been better served burning this misfire rather than letting the world know you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.

Rating: unrated, decorated with F-bombs and songs with F-bombs

Cast: Jessie Jaylee, Nashawn Kearse, LaShonda ‘LaLa’ Courtney, Clifton Powell

Credits: Directed by J. Jesses Smith, scripted by Jessie Jaylee. An Entertainment Squad release.

Running time: 1:37

There’s always a hint of defiance in mentioning the movie you’re most determined to steal from. It’s a dare, like “Sure, COMPARE our movie to that one.” Usually, it’s a bit misguided.

“You can’t outrun the curse! Haven’t you ever seen ‘The Ring?'”

Why yes, yes I have. And its sequels. And lots of ther movies that have used the “Don’t look at that video/answer that phone or you’ll be CURSED” hook. And a lot of horror movies with a “found footage” element, maybe vloggers who “investigate” this or that phenomena for their streaming show. Oh, and movies with a deadly “Bloody Mary” or the like incantation/nursery rhyme element.

“Baby Blue, Baby Blue, don’t look back, Mama’s behind you”

Yes, we’ve seen it all before. Is it advisable to remind us of that?

“Baby Blue” is a horror tale in which a 20something quartet — some siblings (Aramis Knight, Ally Ioannides), a videographer (Dylan Sprayberry) and a fraidy cat they grew up with nicknamed “Beans” (Cyrus Arnold) — have to up their streaming pranks-for-clicks-game by throwing in some “true crime,” and maybe a little “woo-woo” stuff — horror.

They’ll look into this suicide seemingly caused by the spirit of “the youngest serial killer ever.”

Sure, check out the CCTV footage of an unseen person or force shoving, strangling and menacing hapless Kelvin (Khylin Rambo). Ask around about him, if you want.

But whatever you do, don’t look at this video preserved on his cell phone. You can’t “unsee” it. It’s so gruesome and shocking.

And by the way, it’s “cursed.”

Remember, “You can’t outrun the curse! Haven’t you ever seen ‘The Ring?'”

The fun stuff in Adam Mason’s horror tale has the young entrepreneurs getting into a shouting match with “Mo” (Oliver Cooper) their streamer boss, and the over-the-top ways hapless Beans deals with the stress of being under a curse and facing peril without a lot of grace under fire.

He’s constantly berating their videographer, Hutch (Sprayberry) with “You short INCEL!” insults.

Will he “find solace in death itself?” Maybe.

Other than that, this strictly-formula/wholly-derivative tale of “terror” never quite works up a decent fright, even if it achieves the lower genre aim of “horror movie as streaming timekiller.”

Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Aramis Knight, Ally Ioannides, Cyrus Arnold, Dylan Sprayberry, Sal Lopez, Oliver Cooper and Khylin Rambo.

Credits: Directed by Adam Mason, scripted by Simon Boyes and Adam Mason. An XYZ Films release on Tubi.

Running time: 1:29

Getting romance in a science fiction blockbuster is a rare and precious thing. Raising the stakes, amping up the action, Chalamet maturing into the role.

This looks and FEELS ike a major step up from the somewhat tedious “universe building” franchise introduction.

Nov. 3.

Tense, tight and comically dark, movies like “Very Big Shot” are why you take cinematic journeys Around the World with Netflix.

If not for the streaming service resurrecting this Lebannese gem from 2016, it might have passed unnoticed, save for the film festival circuit and whatever notoriety it gained in the few markets where it played.

It’s a thriller set in the Beirut where “the war” was so long ago it is but background noise, but where economic struggle and ethnic strife live on, and three Christian brothers figure dad’s Royal Pizza bakery is no easy route to happiness.

The armed robbery and “accidental” murder in the opening scene sends the youngest, Jad (Wissam Fares), the one brother with no prior convictions, to prison. But that’s merely a gateway crime.

By the time Jad gets out, they’re all-in on drug smuggling, but with mercurial and violent Ziad (Alain Saadeh) plotting their way out and into legitimacy. Middle brother Joe (Tarek Yaacoub)? He’d like to keep the pizzaria going, with or without “special” additions tucked into the boxes of customers who’d like a little hashish, cocaine or what have you.

Ziad’s plan is to buy a restaurant “for Jad,” as his reward for taking the rap for Ziad in that shooting five years before.

But it’s not until Ziad has to strong-arm one of their “regulars,” the lumpy, nerdy documentary filmmaker Charbel (Fouad Yammine) that Ziad hears the story of an aged Lebanese filmmaker who broke into the business on an Italian film shot in Lebanon. The movie shoot was just a cover for smuggling drugs into Europe in film cannisters. That could be their way “out.”

No, he never uses the phrase (in Arabic with English subtitles) “one last score.” But he could have.

Even though most of the world has gone digital in their movie making, that scheme could still work he figures, sealed exposed film footage in cans that can’t be x-rayed or opened by airport security would be the perfect way to smuggle pills to “cousin Roger in Erbil,” and also points West.

Director Mir-Jean Bou Chaaya and his co-writer/star Saadeh establish Ziad’s impulsiveness in that opening murder and his quick-study cunning in the middle acts. Ziad has the paranoia every career criminal grows into, and it’s what keeps him alive. When the aged big boss of the local drug trade doesn’t want to let him “get out” and start a restaurant for the brother who went to prison on his behalf, Ziad is suspicious.

When he travels to Syria to make one last pick-up, he figures out why he was told to travel “unnarmed.” He’s been set up. Being wary and a man of violence, he shoots his way out of that. Now he’s got drugs he needs to move, a “boss” who wants those drugs back, and maybe his head, and two brothers — Jad is just now getting out of prison — who can’t help him figure a way out of this, the worst jam he’s ever gotten them into.

Enter the cinema-savvy/drug-craving filmmaker Charbel. Ziad’s got acess to cash, and being a brutish, cunning psychotic, is good at getting his way. He’s a born film producer.

“Very Big Shot” begins as a good if somewhat conventional drug-trade thriller, with violence, tense negotiations, interrogations and a “meet” gone wrong. Chaaya and Saadeh’s script then turns, not into an all-out comedy, but certainly into a dark spoof of movie making that’s pitched somewhere between the Vittorio de Sica/Peter Sellers farce “After the Fox” and Ben Affleck’s thriller with a hint of comedy, “Argo.”

Here, the “film shoot” includes trying to turn amateurish locals — including two of the brothers — into actors, “actors” who can’t understand why they should dress like Muslims or kiss an actress or tamp down their religious/ethnic prejudices. There are thuggish goons turned into grips, a bullying producer who cares nothing about the film and everything about getting things done his way and a naive idealist behind the camera who is bullied by the producer and intimidated by the (American?) director of photography in charge of filming this possible debacle.

Charbel is so clueless he can’t see that his lovely girlfriend and leading lady (Alexandra Kahwagi) is cheating on him. No wonder he’s sure he can get his movie out of all this.

Chaaya toys with Beirut’s barely-concealed age-old ethnic strife and the seat-of-the-pants chaos of “I’ll fix it in POST (production)” filmmaking. Near riots break out in the middle of scenes, but hey, that could WORK in the finished cut!

And Chaaya pays tribute to the first Lebanese filmmaker to ever show a movie at Cannes, Georges Nasser, who is the subject of Charbel’s documentary and whose “Italian drug smuggling in film cannisters” memory inspires Ziad. Nasser died a couple of years after “Very Big Shot” was finished.

Saadeh has a seething, inscrutable charisma as Ziad, carrying the narrative along on Ziad’s impulses, his wily instincts and barely-concealed desperation. It’s a great performance.

The shifts in story and ever-evolving plot objectives probably scared major distributors off when “Very Big Shot” was being shopped around for release. Nobody involved has gone on to bigger and better things because of that. Yet.

But it’s suspenseful, culturally immersive, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny and now streaming where anybody can see it thanks to Netflix. Don’t pass this “Very Big Shot” by.

Rating: TV-MA, violence.

Cast: Alain Saadeh, Wissam Fares, Tarek Yaacoub, Alexandra Kahwagi and Fouad Yammine.

Credits:Directed by Mir-Jean Bou Chaaya, scripted by Mir-Jean Bou Chaaya and Alain Saadeh A Netflix release.

Running time:1:47

So, it’s a Liam Neeson “Speed?”

August 25, Liam and Matthew Modine and lesser know co-stars take his “particular skills” to the streets.

Classic late August B-movie with a big star and a few possibilities about it.

Richard Armitage gives off Big Liam Neeson energy in “The Man from Rome,” a papal thriller about land grabs, murder and historical church coverups set in that picture postcard in the south of Spain, Seville.

But while casting the veteran of “The Hobbit” franchise as a man of action, a Vatican investigator and “any means necessary” fixer looks like a nice fit, it’s almost all this picture has going for it.

The script is a convoluted, low-stakes affair with weak motivations, half a dozen credited screenwriters and a gaping hole where a proper villain should be.

Directed Sergio Dow (“Hemingway, the Hunter of Death”) and his collaborating screenwriters seem hamstrung by what appears to have been a stodgy source novel, odd considering its author is as infamous for charges of plagiarism as his ultra-conservative political columns in the Spanish press.

You’re adapting, team. Fix plot shortcomings, turn some characters into composites, give it some pace, up the ante and make it a MOVIE for heaven’s sake.

Armitage is an Irish-born military veteran turned priest on a special papal unit — NOT the one Russell Crowe’s motor-scootering around Europe doing exoricisms for, alas. But yes, the great Italian heartthrob Franco Nero plays “Il Papa” in this movie as well as “The Pope’s Exorcist.”

There’s this historic church in Seville slated for deconsecration and demolition, but precious enough that some folks want to save it, especially the heiress to the family that donated the land it is built on way back in the 18th century.

Father Quart (?) is sent by private jet to Seville to sort things out. He brings his laptop and his pistol and his com-links with the Vatican’s situation room control-agent priest (Carlos Cuevas), the tech nerd fending off hackers to the Holy Father’s account. Somehow, somebody got an email through to His Holiness about this church debacle, so Father Cooey isn’t the ace security guy he seems.

Still, he’ll monitor Father Quart’s moves via video uplinks, and point him towards quarries, foes and all the right moves in Spain.

The not-divorced Catholic socialite/heiress (Amaia Salamanca) will fret over the fact that Quart is “too good looking to be a priest” and she tries to save her family’s church.

Backroom finance deals with the usual suspects — oligarchs and Arab oil sheikhs — blackmail over sexual misconduct and a stubborn old priest (“Raiders of the Lost Ark” alumnus Paul Freeman) who doesn’t want to give up the ghost or Our Lady of Tears Cathedral are involved.

Bodies pile up and the more characters show up, from cops ready to pitch Quart a job “if you ever want to trade that collar for a badge,” to scheming priests and monsignors (Paul Guilfoyle is one of them) to the heiress’s regal mother (Fionnula Flanagan) who seems a tad sketchy, to the crusading architectural restoration specialist (Alicia Borrachero) who turns out to be a social activist nun.

Virtually none of them have enough to work with to jolt this picture off the flatline it opens with and tracks through straight to the anti-climactic finale. There are several unnamed heavies, a couple of sketchy characters and one a tad sketchier and more ruthless than others, but not anybody’s idea of a Villain with a capital “V.”

And Armitage isn’t Neesonesque enough to manage that by himself.

It’s enough to bring out the lapsed Irish Catholic in any critic, as in “JAYzus this’is dull.”

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situation

Cast: Richard Armitage, Amaia Salamanca, Paul Guilfoyle, Alicia Borrachero, Carlos Cuevas, Rodolfo Sancho, Paul Freeman and Franco Nero.

Credits: Directed by Sergio Dow, scripted by Sergio Dow, Adrian Bol, Gretchen Cowan, Carolina López-Rodriguez, Sheila Willis and Luis Zelkowicz, based on a novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 2:00

Submitted for your approval, two men sequestered in a “Biosphere” of their own creation, isolated from civilization, Beckett characters in a Pirandello parable of human evolution in a time of ecological crisis and existential disconnect due to ever-changing pronouns.

It’s a post-COVID, culture-poking satire with a “Twilight Zone” self-seriousness and “the future of the human race” as both food for thought and dangling punchline.

This minimalist dramedy is kind of the logical end game of the “mumblecore” talkathon comedies that the Duplas Brothers (“The Puffy Chair,” “Baghead”) helped pioneer. Sterling K. Brown and Mark Duplass co-star in “Biosphere,” and Mark Duplass co-wrote Mel Eslyn’s feature directing debut. It almost goes without saying that brothers Jay and Mark produced it.

I love those Duplass boys, and I’m a big fan of the esteemed Mister Brown. And as much as this movie serves up food for thought, I have to say I wish it was funnier, deeper and sharper.

It’s about what happens with human survival on the line, and all that’s left are two lifelong friends — one a scientist, the other a Yalie of the George W. Bush variety — in a self-sustaining geodesic dome.

The limits of friendship will be tested. Sort of. The shifting power dynamics of who is “contributing” more to their survival, as one is a multi-degree scientist and the other given to discourses on The Super Mario Bros, will come into play. Maybe.

“Lethal Weapon” will be viewed and “Jurassic Park” will be quoted.

And SOMEbody’s going to go through some changes and find himself grateful that the other fellow thought to keep a copy of “The New Our Bodies, Ourselves” on their bookshelves for this real-life/real-consequences “experiment” in whether humanity has what it takes to survive.

We drop in on Ray (Brown) and Billy (Duplass) mid-routine, their daily jog and chores. There’s not a lot of space in this habitat. And there’s a lot of darkness outside it. The vibe is a little “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a lot “Silent Running.”

Because this tale set in an isolated dome isn’t an isolation “experiment.” A calamity has come and these two — with limited but logical explanation — were here to witness it and endure, at least a while longer.

They joke, reminisce and bicker when the limitations of their living space become obvious.

“Maybe you should’ve built a better dome.” “Maybe if you’d done YOUR JOB we wouldn’t need to live in a dome!”

The death of the last female of their self-sustaining food-fish tank family rings their emotional alarm bells — “This is the end, this is reality time!” Only it isn’t the end.

Fish have figured out adaptation strategies. And when Billy turns sensitive, “stomach ache” prone and busty, they and we wonder if he’s just sick or if it’s Darwinian and if their lifelong conceptions of gender, procreation and the boundaries attached to masculine affection are about to get a work out.

Scientist Ray is ready to work the problem. Emotional Billy isn’t signing off on that.

“I have a DOCTORATE…”

“In bioCHEMISTRY!

The biodome as a dramatic/comic crucible for society and human nature and Earth ecology is older than Pauly Shore. The novelty here is the gender twist on what it takes to ensure human survival, that we EVOLVE, at least in an emotional and psychological sense.

I like what the movie bites off, and its timing seems right. Despite the homophobic outrage by a shrinking minority and the opportunistic politicians who pander to them, societal attitudes have been shifting in a steady cycle of fits and starts since the 1969 Stonewall Riots, whose anniversary is being observed as I write this review.

People have evolved, and the “hope” engendered by “Biosphere” is that there’s inevitability to that, and to human survival in the face of hate, violence and anti-science militancy.

As with any movie, what you get out of “Biosphere” is partly dependent on what you bring to it. But in this case, I think most of us inclined to go see it will be doing all its heavy lifting for it, as what’s here feels slight, incomplete and not nearly as funny, cute and deep as these folks seem to believe.

Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Sterling K. Brown, Mark Duplass.

Credits:Directed by Mel Eslyn scripted by Mark Duplass and
Mel Eslyn. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:46

This female fury unleashed thriller goes digital and “Uncork’d” August 1.

Like your B-movies with blood and a bustline? Here you go.

Some decent fight choreography and a couple of well-staged shootouts decorate the Malay thriller “The Assistant,” an action pic for those who like their violence bloody and something close to non-stop.

It takes a very long while to get going, and some of those kick-slice-punchouts pass slowly enough to look like brawls filled with stage-punches thrown at half speed. But it’s gonzo enough for genre fans to check out, even if it isn’t on a par with the best Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, Thai or Vietnamese one-man-against-many bloodbaths. Not yet, anyway.

Zafik (Iedil Dzuhrie Alaudin) is fresh out of prison. He makes a beeline for his old house, long-abandoned, and weeps. His wife and son died while he was serving time.

No promises to “help you out” by the old friend Sam (Henley Hii) who has become a tycoon in the intervening years, comfort him. No advice from former cellmake Huan (Kin Wah Chew) eases his pain. Kuan can’t even talk Zafik out of his need for revenge.

“He has to pay for this,” Zafik hisses (in Malay with English subtitles). It’s the “He” that he’s uncertain about.

His wife and child were murdered, and nobody was brought to justice. Sam and Huan are at a loss. The police aren’t even consulted, as it’s accepted wisdom that they’re lazy and corrupt.

But there’s this fellow Zafik keeps stumbling into, a cocky, gangster-groomed giggler name Feroz (Hairul Azreen). As Zafik takes a “collection” job from Sam as his offer of “help,” he’s going to be toting around cash, and sooner or later he’s going to get jumped. That’s when Feroz steps in and kicks ass, giggling all the way.

He’s a “cousin” of Zafik’s late wife, he says, and he’s out for revenge. But while Zafik wants answers and information, Feroz would rather catch, torture and kill his way from junkies to dealers to whoever really did the deed, and their reasons.

Some gangsters see them coming from a long way off. Others never know what hit them. But one by one or two by two, a reckoning is on its way up the ladder.

Martial artist and stuntman turned brawling lead Azreen makes a convincing and amusing badass. Alaudin has the subtler job, reacting to the mayhem, shrieking “You’re CRAZY” every so often and generally requiring rescue from his aggressive “assistant.”

The script’s twists are too obvious to even bother guessing. And that slow start can be discouraging, if you’ve just dropped in on this title at random.

But the action picks up, the sadism spreads, the blood flows and the giggling reaches a higher pitch as we march, car-chase, torture and kill our way towards a climax, sluggishly chased by an anti-climax.

It took a few years for Hong Kong, Thai, Korean and Indonesian action pictures to hit their stride, push the envelope and reset the standard with the “Old Boy,” “Ong Bok,” “The Raid” and so forth.

Adrian Teh’s “The Assistant” shows how Malay melees are beyond their baby steps now and almost ready for the big time.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Iedil Dzuhrie Alaudin, Hairul Azreen, Henley Hii, Farali Khan and
Kin Wah Chew

Credits: Directed by Adrian Teh, scripted by Chi-Ren Choong and Adrian Teh. A Netflix release.

Running time: