Yasmine (5.5/10)

That opening shot of the brand new local actress. Liyana Yus, jumping out of her tree house and ran across the screen, with that beautiful cinematography by James Teh; coupled with a cheerful and heart-warming background music, I actually believed that we were going to get something special with Yasmine.

Unfortunately, after 30 minutes in, things started to fall apart; beginning with the dubbing of the dialogue.

The weakest part of the production laid in the writing. None of the scenes and dialogues actually introduced who the characters were. We saw them appear on the screen, they have brief exchange of words, but who exactly were Nadiah Wahid and Roy Sungkono's characters and what were their personalities. Even the relationship developments, especially between Sungkono and Yus, were never shown; and the audience was left to come to certain conclusions as the story jumped from plot to plot.

There's also a huge gap between what's being marketed and what we actually get from this movie. For one, I thought this movie was about the martial art form of Silat. The movie even asked a couple of times during key moments, what is Silat exactly. There was also a beautiful quote used about flowing like water and how water when in the hand becomes the hand, well, that's no longer beautiful when it was just words thrown around and never turned into practical form.

This was a movie that was supposed to be introducing Silat to the world. But getting Hong Kong superstar action choreographer Chan Man Ching was clearly not enough because Chan didn't seem to know anything about Silat. None of the fight scenes in the tournament represented what Silat is. The kids were just throwing punches and kicking and with a few convincing poses here and there. Only when Reza Rahadian, playing Yasmine's father, started performing then I saw Silat. But that was less than a minute's worth.

Worse was, we didn't even get to see Yus' character actually learn Silat. She just up and started performing it, even throwing in Wing Chun art form right at the beginning which really baffled me. None of the multiple Silat masters she and her little team sought out actually taught them Silat. During their "training" we saw the kids do many other stuff, but not Silat. The producers should have recruited a Silat choreographer to collaborate with Chan's experience in movie making.

And where's that Yasmine pose the marketing team has been throwing around? It was never used in the movie.

But there were a few redeeming qualities. If you can see past the music video-like montages (which were way too many and ate up the running time), James Teh's cinematography was excellent. And I do believe we have ourselves here a brand new talent in Liyana Yus. As a first-timer, I was able to follow her from her innocence days to her dark days. She showed a little bit of range that can only improve with practice.

But the movie as a whole came together only after the scream, "Yasmine, jangan!" That's when everything unfolded, and the rest of the movie made much more sense. Unfortunately, only about 20 minutes was left in the movie by then.

All other subplots in the movie were very distracting. The impact from the death of Yasmine's mom played by Carmen Soo was never obvious. And to write in that love triangle was an embarrassing effort. Not only did it show the weakness of the script, but also made the protagonist and the other guy (whose character didn't properly flesh out too) looked way too juvenile.

There were many other little details that were written in but left holes later on, like to participate in the tournament the team had to have 4 participants, if not 1 of the participants may have to compete twice in a single round. That never came to play either.

Overall, I appreciate the effort here but it was just disappointing.