Jeremy Sitorus

Generally, the problem with biopics is that often they whitewash the subjects to play into existing popular, one-sided conceptions of deeply flawed subjects for commercial gain. The Greatest Showman has the dubious honor of representing a remarkable achievement – it has managed to take a man who was already an American pariah to begin with and completely straightfacedly whitewashed him to meet nonexistent popular demand. In other words, it managed to create money out of nothing. It boggles the mind. Choreography is amusing.

Not awful, but comes off as a desperate attempt to recapture the dark magic of the Dirty Money episode about the very same scandal. It feels like an overly slick, overly commercial, and overly exploitative version of Zachary Heinzerling's take, full of AI-generated caricatures and the same players in both the scandal and the initial miniseries: Clare Rewcastle-Brown looks almost annoyed at having to rehash everything three years later, Ho Kay Tat has aged, and Najib himself has gone from the enigmatic, semi-amused mastermind to a visibly bloated old man who half looks on the verge of admitting everything just to get it over with. It also feels dishonest for the documentary to turn the conversation so firmly back to Jho Low in an attempt to capitalize off of the Hollywood glitz and glamor with which he was so inexorably tied, rather than Najib the anocrat and the equal partner in grand political and socioeconomic theft from the Malaysian people. Instead, we get Najib the helpless fool, a foolish second fiddle to Jho – exactly the narrative he has always wanted to push. It is saved from being terrible by high production values and being engaging enough for those new to the story, but the only real improvement over Dirty Money is Anwar Ibrahim, now PM, being free to rightfully castigate Mahathir Mohamad, whereas both of them were in the miniseries cast as heroes.