First of all, something needs to be made clear about Ramsey Nouah’s brilliantly directed Tòkunbò (2024), before we take a deep dive into the movie.
After its prologue, we find the starring act Tòkunbò (Gideon Okeke) working out in his apartment. He pumps fists into a punching bag, indicating regular practice. But in a fight scene towards the end of the film, where he squares up with the pernicious Gaza (Chidi Mokeme), Labule’s crime kingpin, none of Tòkunbò’s boxing skills suffices as he receives continuous jabs from his attacker and is beaten to a pulp.
A gross scriptwriting mistake?
What did Anton Chekhov say again about never bringing a gun on stage if it’s not going to be fired?
The two actors give a good account of themselves with Mokeme extending the menacing mien he exhibited in Shanty Town without missing a beat while Okeke inhabits the spirit of the Lagos hustler.
The first scenes of Tòkunbò are a kind of rare Nollywood gold. Arresting. Cinematic. Fine camera work and picture. The effect is well-realised that you ready yourself for a feast.
We encounter Tòkunbò, a regular hustling Lagos bobo racing in a yellow sports car to cross Benin’s Seme Border into Lagos to avoid paying import duty on the car. It’s a well-known criminal scheme run by syndicates who recruit smart drivers, usually young men looking for a quick buck.
Tòkunbò has a curious love for phones: as he drives, he dialogues with an unseen character on the phone, bewailing his job and the economy. He switches from that to a video call with his wife whose “water just broke” and who threatens him not to end the call on her. But the police are on his trail so he ends the call and speeds off, escaping.
He finally arrives at the garage to deliver the car to Gaza, a crime lord, who pays him short. Tòkunbò also watches as Gaza cuts off the arm of a teenager he’s accused of stealing from him.
Tòkunbò is pissed at being ripped off and vows to quit racing cars across the border. Gaza is not entirely happy about this but bids Tòkunbò a hearty goodbye.
The screen goes black. The title Tòkunbò appears. The screen dissolves into an aerial shot and we read the caption: “18 Months Later.”
Tòkunbò is an Uber driver, operating an old, beat-up, red Toyota Camry 2004, in which, still a phone man, he constantly communicates with his wife, who is at the hospital with their bedridden son who is suffering a heart disease.
It is in this Camry that he suddenly hears the shrill ringtone of a phone. When he checks, there is an SMS asking him to pick up and deliver an unknown package. The pay is huge. N250,000. Done. He gets another SMS. He delivers. He collects more cash—more like free cash. This is exciting. Suddenly, Tòkunbò can literally taste the possibility of raising money for his son’s heart surgery.
Then comes a final message to deliver a package to the Seme Border in 3 hours. The fee is ten million naira (an amount that would later go higher). But there is a catch; this time the package is not just an ordinary package. Will he or will he not?
Tòkunbò is written as a thriller and action movie. Ramsey Nouah’s ambitions as director are not very grand. It is a trite storyline of the regular Omo Eko, whose creed is to simply make it to see another day, but then struck by misfortune, in Tòkunbò’s case, his son’s heart disease, as he faces a dilemma from which finding a way out becomes a double-edged sword that leads to crime.
Sometimes the option is to pull a heist and we have seen a few recent instances in Nollywood. There has been Funke Akindele’s A Tribe Called Judah, and Dimeji Ajibola’s Saving Onome. Or in the case of Tòkunbò, it is to get mixed up in a crime that’s too expensive and life-threatening.
A few things get smashed in this movie. A car’s windscreen. Another car crashes and sinks in the lagoon. There is even a helicopter. The movie seems to have had a sizeable budget and appears to tick all the right boxes, which is not surprising when you consider the fact that six studios—Ramsey Films, Blue Pictures, Sozo Films, Ingene Studios, and two more—came together to make it happen.
But what’s also obvious is we can’t shake the persistent feeling that we are watching Hollywood in Nollywood’s garb. HollyNolly, I call it.
Merry Men 3 doesn’t escape a name check here. What is wrong? Why can’t we localise content to accentuate our terrain? Why do we have to endure watching Nollywood but feeling we are in a Manhattan suburb?
Surely, we’d have ourselves to blame again if the NOSC cannot find a movie to select for the Oscars this year. Although C.J. Fiery Obasi’s Mami Wata was selected last year, the decision was a sweet error; it was not an Oscar-worthy film.
What pulsates, nonetheless, in Tòkunbò is Lagos coming alive on the screen. But don’t get me wrong: this is a fine film with good re-watch value, even if it moves both in the right and wrong direction like a two-headed snake.
Photo Credit: cineamo.com
**Carl Tever writes about film, literature and music. He tweets @carlterver
