Kidnap

***This review contains spoilers***

“There’s just something very creepy about that your friend. It feels like I’ve known him and hated him in another life”

How I wish you had known him and hated him in another life! Even that seems like a more realistic premise for a movie than this one.

The movie ‘kidnap’ is centered around four friends who seek to take out vengeance on their ex-boss by kidnapping his daughter and extorting a huge ransom from him. Now, even though I don’t think it makes much sense to kidnap as vengeance, I also see how frustration could possibly lead people in extreme situations to that (this is not my justification for kidnapping in any shape or form).

The movie is a basically a sequence of highly unrealistic events, the ‘kidnap’ aspect being the closest to ‘realistic’. It didn’t make sense to me how a young girl would witness her brothers being killed by her kidnappers and yet have the effrontery to mouth off to them. It didn’t make any sense that the kidnappers would choose to stay in the same city as their victim after release. And to cap the foolishness off, one of the kidnappers would now choose to fall in love with the ex-victim and actually pursue that love all the way to a relationship. These are only a select few of the ridiculous aspects of this movie, rest assured there were definitely many more but since if I turn off my brain, I could possibly justify them, I choose not to mention them.

I think OC Ukeje is possibly the definition of the quintessential Nollywood actor. His fluidity, his charm, his persona, is definitely undeniable. I would have preferred if he was the lead in this movie, however, I can’t deny that he played his ‘bad boy/rebellious’ role well.

The lead was Joseph Benjamin, an actor who is still honing his skills. Since his days in “Mr & Mrs“, slight improvements are noticeable in his acting however there is still more than enough room for improvement. Scenes where he’s supposed to be cute and lovey mostly came off as uneasy and comical. He didn’t seem so bad to me the first time I saw Mr & Mrs., however, after seeing the movie so many times you tend to get over Nse’s awesomeness and notice the other actors for what they really are.

The same applies to Mbong Amata, the first time I saw her in “Amazing Grace“, I thought she was phenomenal. That was probably as a result of good directing, or my former tendency to extend the attributes of the movie to the actors involved (i.e Good actors make the movie good — which has proven false, time and time again). Mbong seemed to be overacting in this movie from scene to scene.

The joy that I felt once Morris’ character was shot is inexplicable. I immediately started praying in my mind “please be dead, please be dead, please be dead” and thankfully he was dead lol. I’d have to say that one of the most amazing things about this movie is that Morris Sesay’s character only had about 1 and a half scenes (the half because he was dead in the other half of that scene – 🙂 ).

Right next to OC Ukeje was Omoni Oboli as regards talent. This was my first time of seeing Okey Uzoeshi on screen and of the little I saw of him, I can only describe him with one word and that’s ‘fluid’.

One very vexating aspect of this movie is that they don’t maximize their talent, i.e. they don’t use their talent well. It doesn’t make sense to me to have actors like OC, Omoni and Chioma in a movie yet highlight actors like Joseph and Mbong mainly.

I can’t finish without mentioning Tess Abubakar, I’ve only seen her in two movies (this and In The Cupboard) and in both movies, she’s done a great job with her characters. Granted they’ve both been the same character and one cannot really say much of her as an actress until she does other roles.

The entire movie was supposed to create a certain feel that it fell short of achieving mostly because of the unrealistic aspects, the below par actors that were constantly on screen and the angling of the camera? What was up with that? I couldn’t understand what the purpose of having the camera shoot from such random oblique angles was. It’s not creating any effect, it’s just giving me a headache and confusing the life out of me.

Trailer: