Blood & Oil (Oloibiri)

There’s a thing to be said for the effort! The effort at making a beautiful movie, with renowned actors that sends a message, and if possible, lights the fire for a revolution. However, just having the formula down never quite manages to do the trick on its own.

Blood and Oil aka ‘Oloibiri’ is the story of the modern day community of Oloibiri – some 50 years after its first drop of oil is discovered. It follows the story of regret of an older man (played by Olu Jacobs), for not doing more to stop the exploration and exploitation of the white man. It follows the story of the vigilante leader, Gunpowder (played by RMD), who leaves a potentially lucrative career and takes up the fight for his community. And also the story of the older man’s grandson – the generation after – who is left to deal with the ruins.

The interplay of the characters is well thought out and effortless. No character is purposeless nor does any stick out like a sore thumb. The most magnificent thing about the movie though is definitely the shots. Frame for frame, the film is pure beauty. The opening shot is motivation enough to sit through the rest of the 95 minute debacle. Unfortunately, the same standard is not held throughout the movie. Somewhere around the 60-70 minute mark, the standard noticeably drops. It is not just for the cinematography that dwindles but also the direction and the cohesiveness of the already struggling storytelling. It doesn’t dwindle to the standards of your average Lagos Island film but it doesn’t keep the same pace as earlier.

Richard Mofe Damijo as an angry vigilante is an interesting sell. On the one hand, it’s easy to see the applicability from the angle of selling the story and its characters based on the contrasting generations. However, on the other hand, RMD does not convince through and through. Granted he is angry when he needs to be angry but he never manages to transfer that anger from the face of his character to the hearts of the audience. In the end, it felt more like the cinematography and the music was doing a lot of work to compensate for that and sell the audience emotionally.

But it wasn’t just RMD that was a hard sell. The movie lacked the core storytelling aspect that makes a movie memorable. So even though its beautiful to look at, and many aspects reveal thorough pre-planning, budgeting and execution, the connection is lacking to many of the characters and most of the emotions stop at a surface level. I hate to compare movies but there’s something that Kemi Adetiba’s “King of Boys” was able to achieve in the first 10 minutes with the scene of Solo Sobowale’s first act of violence that this movie is not able to accomplish with RMD in the entire 95 minutes of gore and bloodshed.

There are a lot of powerful motifs and thematic constructs that make silent points here but without the connection to the audience it ends up feeling like a really expensive sermon. So I’ll spare you the work and let you know the morale of the story: the older generation failed us, the generation after that was too concerned with self and our current generation is too easily distracted to fight for anything else. There! Now you know. So if you watch it, watch it for the pretty shots.