When Terbang was announced, it had all the on-paper ingredients for a domestic box-office hit. Directed by Chiu Keng Guan — the filmmaker behind the massive multicultural success Ola Bola — the film was billed as a loose biopic of Malaysian rally legend Karamjit Singh.
Karamjit’s real-world career achievements speak for themselves. In 2002, driving a rebadged Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution (Proton PERT), he became the first Asian driver to win the FIA Production Car World Rally Championship on his first attempt. Yet, his career was defined by constant financial struggle, forcing him to sell his apartment and cars to keep racing.
Despite this rich source material and a proven director, the first major, feature-length theatrical film dedicated to rally racing in Malaysia grossed (to date) a disappointing RM2.6 million at the local box office. So why did it miss the mark?
A Missed Opportunity
Sports biopics succeed by selling the person; the sport comes second. Terbang ignored its most compelling storytelling hook: Karamjit’s actual struggle in his rallying career.
The Flying Sikh’s story goes beyond his rally achievements. The gritty reality of a world champion who fought through financial ruin and a chronic lack of sponsorship would have made for a great premise for a motorsports movie.
Instead, Terbang opted for a highly sanitised, fictionalised narrative that only takes threads of Karamjit’s life. We follow Ajeet, a character loosely inspired by the real Karamjit Singh. He is a talented rally racer haunted by trauma from a horrific accident, causing him to isolate himself from the world of motorsports.
By streamlining the specific complexities of Karamjit’s career, Terbang failed to deliver a story with the emotional weight necessary to captivate a general audience. We are left with a film that uses rallying merely as a backdrop for a conventional paint-by-numbers sports drama, rather than exploring the real sacrifice required by Karamjit in order to succeed.
The Demographic Disconnect
With an estimated production budget of RM10 million, a domestic film like Terbang needed to tap into mass appeal to succeed financially. While marketing efforts were made to target the motorsports and automotive community, the harsh truth is that they were simply too small a crowd for the film to be profitable — a reality reflected in the film’s underwhelming RM1.2 million opening week.
F1: The Movie had Brad Pitt and a Hollywood marketing budget, but its real advantage in Malaysia was an audience that Sepang spent nearly two decades building. Formula 1 already had a local fanbase waiting for it. Rallying has never had that crowd here, and one film was never going to create it.
What’s more, its lacklustre box office performance may have raised difficult questions about the Malaysian cinema landscape. Terbang attempted to capture a Malay-majority audience with a Malay-language, mass market film, yet relegated its Malay actors to secondary roles behind non-Malay leads. This demographic mismatch raised questions as to the general positioning of this movie and its intended audience. Can a Malay movie attract a Malay audience without Malay leads?
The Cinematic Problem with Rallying
Rally racing also presents inherent challenges for filmmakers. Unlike the immediate, wheel-to-wheel combat of Formula 1, rallying is solitary. It is an isolated battle against the clock. Terbang highlights this with extended, quiet sequences of its protagonist navigating courses along with his co-driver.
Chiu and the production crew at WooHoo Pictures made a deliberate decision to rely on practical, real-world filmmaking rather than green screens and CGI in an attempt to recreate the raw experience of rallying, but sustaining rally action across a feature-length runtime without losing momentum is difficult.
Without the visceral, combative drama of cars trading paint, the film needed a rock-solid script to carry the emotional weight. Unfortunately, this created an additional uphill challenge for Terbang to overcome.
Flawed Execution and Nostalgia Bait
At two hours and fifteen minutes, Terbang demands a fair bit of patience. While the runtime gives room to explore the main protagonist’s trauma and family dynamic, many of the character subplots feel overcrowded or underdeveloped. Releasing the movie a day after Malaysia Day also meant the film over-relied on nostalgia-bait gold filters and heavy-handed local music cues.
The result is a simplistic muhibah narrative that lacks bite, right down to the tired trope of positioning a generic white guy as the sole antagonist.
Rather than exploring the real-world “villains” of Karamjit’s career — a lack of domestic corporate sponsorships, institutional apathy, and crippling financial strain — the film pits Ajeet and his struggling Petronas-EON Racing Team against a one-dimensional Caucasian rival on the track.
By substituting the complex, systemic barriers of motorsport funding with a straightforward “us-versus-them” racing rivalry, the script sacrifices the compelling nuance of its source material for a cheap and easily resolvable cinematic conflict.
Lessons For Future Productions
Terbang serves as a fascinating case study for the local film industry. It exposes the commercial risks of marketing a niche sport to a mainstream audience without a grounded, universally resonant story.
For future local productions, it reinforces a harsh reality: cinematic success requires more than a legendary figure and national pride; it demands a precise alignment between storytelling execution and target demographics.
Follow Us