The prospect of watching a home-grown, Joburg-based thriller about a (yes, female) journalist scooping a major story was an exciting one. We undoubtedly have the stories to tell and the talent to tell it. Our movie industry is, furthermore, producing quite remarkable thrillers, comedies, dramas, etc.
Sadly, The Assignment is not remarkable at all.
It has a certain quiet charm to it in the beginning, but that quickly wears thin when the plot goes haywire. There are sprinkles of humour, one or two well-worn South Africanisms, and the chemistry between Kat and Nick is quite endearing. But a great cast can do only so much with terrible dialogue, a ridiculous plot, one-dimensional characters and a rather boring news scoop.
The dialogue contained too much “American” action-flick slang. You’re fucking kidding me! Or: Let’s do this! I was waiting for my new pet hate: I’ve got this. We have a rich vernacular in this country. Use it.
The plot developments are far-fetched. Kat miraculously spots the trained hit squad parked outside her house. She then puts foot, pulls into a driveway and switches off her headlights. The hit squad merely drives by?
After an attempt on her life, Kat sleeps and works in a (weirdly set up) safe house, but motors around Joburg on her own? Nick her husband, also under threat, goes to his 9 to 5?
Kat’s boss, Michael, records an incriminating message inside the offices of the company he is ratting out, just so that his boss can walk in and murder him? Then Kat finds his body and steals the laptop containing the incriminating message? Would the evil boss not have taken the laptop too?
A hacker that gives away a business card with his address on it?
The list is endless.
Kat is supposedly a fractured, complicated journalist who suffers from PTSD and is desperate to get out into the field again. For most of the film she is hell-bent on breaking the story. Even after they threaten her life, and after they abduct her son and pump the poor recovering addict full of drugs, she’s still quite hardegat.
When her change of heart does come, the moment and motivation do not make sense (even though you saw it coming miles away). She goes from “Screw all of you” to “It’s all my fault” in 60 seconds and everybody just goes along with it.
The rest of the characters are one-dimensional props who, without apparently thinking about it twice, give up their jobs and lives to help her out. They are either ridiculously nice to her, or seemingly into her.
It is bad form for a reviewer to walk out of a preview, but I did walk out 20 minutes before it ended. I cared so little about the ending, about which characters would live or die or whether the merger would go through or not, that I decided I would rather go home and write this review.
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