Merry Men: The Real Yoruba
Demons **
Dir:
Toka McBaror. With: Ramsey Nouah, Jim Iyke, Falz the Bad Guy, AY Makun. 106
mins. Cert: 15
Compared
to our French friends, we see nothing like enough African cinema on our
screens, and certainly very little African popular cinema – so the arrival of
this cheerfully duff caper, newly minted as Nigeria’s biggest box-office hit of
2018, might seem a forward step. In and of itself, however, it’s not a vast
improvement on those Nollywood timekillers one chances across on satellite TV’s
outer reaches, serving up 100 minutes of slapdash plotting, variable acting,
mid-scene lighting shifts and consistently muffed jokes. Some of Merry Men has evidently been lost in
translation, hence the businessman cursed for having “chewed every piece of
sliced national cake”. Professionalism was shrugged away long before that, as
in the dialogue scene that proceeds with a car alarm going off down the street.
Ironically,
its emergence here may be down to perceived slickness: there’s visible money
behind it. Our heroes – four bantering Abujans styled after The Hangover’s Wolfpack (or possibly Leo
DiCaprio’s erstwhile Pussy Posse) – pull up in sports cars and set about
manhandling the local women on gleaming, well-dressed sets; their sole
redeeming feature is that they use their access and smooth tongues to rob the
rich and give back to slum-bound relatives. Yet as one merry man is an
industrialist, and another a gigolo, you can’t help wondering why they don’t
just write nearest and dearest a cheque, rather than put themselves through
this torturous non-plot, muddling its way around hacked sex tapes with scant
trace of narrative connecting tissue.
Well, perhaps the home crowd wasn’t going for watertight storytelling. Some of the supporting performances are so broad they can only raise chuckles; and it belatedly earns the novelty of being the first Nigerian film opening in the UK to cite Kurt Vonnegut among its reference points. Yet throughout director Toka McBaror appears far less interested in organising these disparate elements into anything coherent than ensuring the various hotel chains and hire-car providers who put up some of the collateral get the desired placement. We’re left with glimpses and glimmers of a cinema growing in confidence – one that’s learning how to put its resources up on screen in ways that might appeal to audiences at home and abroad. But it’s still very early days.
Merry Men: The Real Yoruba Demons is now playing in selected cinemas.
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