So I finally watched Amazon’s Prime Video’s ‘Gangs of Lagos’, directed by Jade Osiberu. What a load of noise about LUDO!
I said finally, because thanks to Prime Video’s unnecessarily complicated subscription model, every attempt to watch the film, despite having had a Prime Video account for over five years, was an episodic drama in frustration and psychological exhaustion.
Since having the account, I have never been inclined to watch any film on it. So you can imagine my surprise to discover that I couldn’t watch any Nollywood film on the streaming platform.
But this time, I was determined to watch Gangs of Lagos. The hype was palpable. I was tired of being asked to contribute to conversations about a film that seemed impossible for me to access. Even after paying $99 for a forced-year VPN subscription, Amazon Prime still prevented me.
So finally I defaulted to watching it with a girlfriend at her house, on the condition that she was one of the lucky few who could just press play and watch, after which, I canceled my many years old Prime Video subscription immediately.
‘Gangs of Lagos’ is 124 minutes of children playing “Thieves & Robbers” while the adults took turns as referees and judges. It is a tale of life in the rough sketch of Lagos’s heartland.
A place where the survival and coming-of-age story of three childhood friends is fractured by the deleterious actions of adults combined with the gritty navigation of natured existence.
Isale Eko – literally meaning – The bottom of Lagos; is perhaps the most colourful and culturally defining in all its contradictory glory. There is nothing ‘bottom’ about the district that birthed some of the greatest leaders and richest traders of Lagos. Isale Eko is Eko ile, Eko akete, it is the ilu ogbon (Lagos) that tolerates nonsense from nobody.
A glimpse at the scrolling credits left me puzzled and confused. How could a motley crew of experienced filmmakers and producers crash such a story that the final show became inveterate?
The opening scene was an homage to the strength of the women of the district. These women are fearless, authentic, and focus. They beat drums and command rhythms. Woes betide the child of anybody who dared to flex in their presence. They are the mothers of the Eleniyans and grandmothers of the apprentice capos. So when little Oba and Pana attempted to steal from one of the mothers, her initial response was the auto-correct slap to Pana’s ear, forcing Oba to resort to a robbery at knife-point. Survival by any means necessary.
Mama Ifeayin is an easygoing mother, whose husband had been killed by street violence. “Mama Ifeayin‘s (Chioma Akpota) promised meridian just failed to climax. The pain and bitter emotions buried in the bosom of a grieving mother were left to flatline like a lifeless body. The sharp shift to a sober transition was almost like the actor had run out of steam midway through what could have been a powerful soliloquy.
Chioma Akpota is a talented actor, yet the capacity of any actor is the momentary custody of the director.
As the minutes rolled on, the audience gets ready and steady but the movie just doesn’t pivot. Thus becoming a recurring pattern throughout the film. Perhaps in tune with the central story; Gangs of Lagos wasn’t able to keep up with its many promises, with too many moments of brilliance left unsaddled.
It would have been the most enjoyable to finally witness the chutzpah of Adesuwa Etomi – Welligton as Gift. However, on behalf of the “The W- Appreciation Society”, I humbly accept that it’s time to stop all laudable attempts to force-feed us with Mrs. W – the gangster, gangsters, gangster’s moll, or any other imaginable and/or physical bad girl role. We feel it is grossly unfair to demand thorns from a sunflower. So while I am not in support of type-casting, some of the most successful actors in Hollywood have made a living playing the same roles, or playing themselves.
Jennifer Aniston could never be Angelina Jolie, and that’s okay. But the ear-bruising ‘buttification’ of Yoruba from an Isale Eko street child, is just about the final destination of tolerance.
‘’Gangs of Lagos’’, set in Isale Eko, should have been a celebratory orgy of memorable dialogue, which is part of the noun of the district. A critical moment for such dialogue was Oba and Kazeem’s final confrontation. A showdown set on the rooftop with a patched aerial view failed to reach the height of its location.
A son will always remain the first love of a mother, even if that child loses his way. The emotionally fractured and fracturing relationship between Obalola (Tobi Bakre ) and his salvation-seeking mother (Iyabo Ojo) deserved more screen time, plus That dialogue. Once again, we needed more from that random telephone call.
Sadly, another significant moment of teasing brilliance was lost to underwhelming storytelling.
It appears that Director Jáde Osiberu is surprisingly yet to fine-tune her craft both technically and artistically. Her monochromic storytelling style betrays her ambition and the promise of so much more. While the cinematography and landscape profiles of Lagos, spiced with the nostalgic soundtrack, gave momentary gasps of joy and engagement, the fight scenes were an ode to a juvenile reenactment of C-grade street fight scenes.
Even the controversial inclusion of Isale Eko’s cultural possession, that is Eyo, was yet another failure to furnish the audience with, yes you guessed it; more!
An intelligent profile of the festival would have been a colorful splash of cultural history amidst the reality and wreckage of broken dreams, bloodshed, and truncated aspiration. Instead, the director’s alternative was to default to Italian-style mafia gangsterism by replicating the most memorable scene from the 1967 Hollywood film “St Valentine’s Day Massacre”, albeit on the coarse-grained street of Isale Eko.
Western gentrified creative interpretation in a quintessentially Lagos fictional story, just simply will not work. Nigeria is a nuanced country, and Yoruba is a nuanced language. Language is textured by the character of a people, and English just isn’t ours!
What a wasted opportunity! What a pity! What an anti-climax!
Disappointingly, ‘’Gangs of Lagos’’, in spite of all its adventures, turned out to be no more than a flatfooted, clumsy attempt at gangster-flick of nothing more than glorified violence.
