I struggled through the episodes of ‘To Kill A Monkey’. And the sum of my grouse is that most Nollywood film makers don’t care about the consumers—in fact, they seemingly don’t care enough about the art to see it as sacred, to dedicate ample time to creating quality content. They conjure concoctions and dish them out in fancy Chinaware. Well, the Nigerian audience is easy to please. This is not a review.
I love the efforts being made to tell new stories. Yet storytelling is beyond novelty. There’s need for coherence in graphics, sound, and act. There has been a major improvement in photography—there’s an incredible level of attention to visual aesthetics which is lacking in the overall storytelling. We are trying to tell new experiences, but struggling with originality.
There’s an obsession with the West. Hollywood is the standard—and in our craze for validation, rather than emulating, we are imitating. Our cast is Naija, so is our setting, but our stories are adulterated, the temperament is foreign. I almost lost my head when Nosa told her husband, Efe, after she found out he was with an escort earlier that night, to leave the house. That’s not our story!
Beyond the hype, what irked me about this Netflix series is that Kemi Adetiba, who wears the hat of a writer, producer and director isn’t a newbie in the industry, yet the movie succeeded in ending in same, old pitfalls. The story is sketchy and characterisation is superficial. The storytelling is chaotic, elaborate where nuance is needed, and where action or a subtle sequence of visuals and soundtracks should tell the tale, dire dialogues leave nothing to the imagination, as if the intellectual capacity of the audience is in doubt. The two main actors delivered solid performances but the script faltered in too many ways for their acts to save the day.
Our movie makers are fascinated by the crime/action genre but are yet to create one that is truly Nigerian and near flawless. They create animated villains, caricatures—with exaggerated features and mannerism. I long to see a movie where a regular guy, without wild tics, crude facials, and weird laughs is the antihero. I crave detailed investigations and resounding police procedurals. I’m tired of artless violence—a cut and join of old Hollywood action scenes. What the hell was that car bomb scene?
The story had potentials that the script was too lazy to explore in-depth. It’s ingenious to tap into the AI trend but my excitement died as fast as it budded—there was no conviction to the application of artificial intelligence to that scale of Oboz’s cyber-crime empire. There’s a need to balance narratives with technical deftness. It’s not enough to tell us Efe is a software developer and we only see him carry laptops. Imagine the war with Teacher was cyber-inclined—mess up his finances, his business legacy. Doesn’t it take more than being high-level Yahoo Boys to roll like gangsters?
One good thing with “To Kill A Monkey” is that it wasn’t unnecessarily ambitious with special effects—well, there was that trailing hand at the explosion scene. I remember, with a big frown on my face, the disgusting hairy armpits in Kunle Afolayan’s Anikulapo. And the prosthetic breasts in House of Gaa (and Anikulapo). Hollywood has perfected the portrayal of sex and violence as beautiful spectacle, here, we’re still running a monkey-post version, in desperate need of finesse.
It seems that Nigerian movie makers are creating for the wrong audience. I understand the need to export our art, but what’s the point of duplicating the Western template, albeit woefully. How do you sell to the foreigner, what is becoming less attractive at home? The same energy put into cinematography, and trends, should be put into the actual storytelling. It might be time to get more people involved with production—it’s usually difficult to objectively evaluate your own outputs when you play multiple roles.
“To Kill A Monkey” is a brilliant title, and that’s the best part of the eight-episode show. Everything else didn’t live up to the hype. This is not a review.
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