There's A Documentary Coming Out About The Assassins That Killed Kim Jong Un's Brother, And How They Thought They Were Pulling A Prank For A Reality Show.
Variety - But history has proved the doubters wrong. Instead of acting like a wuss who now had nuclear toys, Kim Jong-un proceeded to consolidate his power by purging his regime of skeptics and enemies, wooing the people by taking steps to modernize his country’s economy…and purging more enemies. When you see Kim Jong-un now, he no longer looks like an overgrown baby with a weirdly coiffed military fade. He’s got a killer gleam, and the hair looks kind of…cool. He resembles a cross between the young Chairman Mao and GZA. He’s become the dictator as ice-cold badass.
The event that shifted his image, and that did the most to billboard his gangster attitude, took place on Feb. 13, 2017, the day that his half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, was assassinated in the middle of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia. Most global political observers believed at the time, and still do, that Kim Jong-un, like some totalitarian version of Michael Corleone, was the one who gave the order to murder his relative; he wanted him out of the picture. But the way the killing went down was bizarre. Kim Jong-nam, a royal-family exile, had lived for more than 10 years in Macau, China, and was strolling through the brightly lit airport, on his way home, when he was attacked by two young women — Siti Aisyah, 25, and Đoàn Thj Huong, 28. Each of them came up, in turn, from behind, “Guess who!” style, and put her hands around his face, rubbing it with the deadly nerve agent VX. He was taken to the airport clinic but was dead within an hour. That’s how toxic VX is.
Who were the two women? That’s the gripping subject of “Assassins,” a lively but sinister page-turner of a documentary directed by Ryan White (“Ask Dr. Ruth,” “The Case Against 8”). Like a number of docs I’ve seen at Sundance, notably “The Dissident” (about the murder of the Saudi Arabian Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi), “Assassins” takes a relatively recent news scandal and reassembles it into an illuminating big picture. The events may be familiar to news junkies, yet after being shocked by the murder of King Jong-nam back in 2017, I admit that I followed the story for a while and then lost track of it. The key revelation of “Assassins” — who these women were, and how they came to commit a headline-making hit job in broad daylight — had somehow escaped me (as, I suspect, it did a lot of people). As you watch the movie, I promise that there are moments when your jaw will drop.
What a wild fuckin story.
Chaps, Kate, and Connor covered this when it broke last year but this documentary looks really well done and in-depth.
Talk about a really sad situation. From the looks of it, without giving away too many spoilers, these girls were identified then recruited by an agent posing as a taxi driver with an "in" to a reality prank show, then promised money and fame for doing something they thought was a joke. Along the way they were trained and groomed for this "prank show". They even filmed dozens of these "shows" on other non-assuming victims that were non-lethal and all in good fun. Think dropping fake spiders onto somebody sitting on a park bench type stuff.
So when they pulled the assassination of Kim Jong Un's brother off, they had no idea what they'd done or who they'd done it too.
Really sad stuff.
As Variety tells, it also does a great job showcasing the motivations behind the hit-
But “Assassins” also sketches in what happened from the top. It shows us how Kim Jong-un was elevated over his half-brother in the first place (a great story that might be out of some North Korean version of “Succession”), and how much he still feared him; according to the movie, the Chinese had provided sanctuary to Kim Jong-nam based on then idea that, if necessary, Kim Jong-un could be removed and replaced. The slightly mad tale of the North Korean fascist dynasty, established by Kim Jong-un’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, is riveting, and so is the story of the eight North Korean henchman — including the Malaysian-based chemist who made the VX in his home lab — who were guiding the entire plan.
Assassins, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, premiered in theaters on December 11th and will be available for on-demand viewing on January 15th.