Passport

Passport is the creation of producer Vincent Okonkwo and writer Abosi Ogba and is the latest of movies to transition to streaming after a cinematic run that concluded last year. It tells the story of Oscar (Jim Iyke), a London-based socialite, who is stuck in Lagos ahead of an important trip after his passport-containing bag is snatched by Tobe (Emeka Nwagbaraocha) and Mighty (Lina Idoko), young street urchins in the fictional Brown Area. The latter’s importance is elevated by her sisterly relations to Kopiko (Mercy Johnson), who gets into the mix when Oscar’s attempts to recover his possessions from her sister, and the people she sold them to, ultimately forces him and Kopiko to work together.

With a tight deadline set by Oscar’s 6pm flight and Brown Area’s underground world proving a tough nut to crack, Kopiko, Oscar and Oscar’s Uncle (Jide Kosoko) will have to set aside their differences in a race against time to recover his passport while avoiding clashes between their different, yet equally mean-tempered personalities. It is a collision of worlds as textbook as they come. Oscar, the foul-mouthed, condescending rich kid, and Kopiko the pidgin-spitting, uncivilised area mama.

But no matter the gusto with which Mercy Johnson portrays her—and she does quite well—you can never quite shake the feeling that you are watching a caricature character, something cut out of an instagram skit. And it is a common feeling for the majority of characters—Terminator is the underground crime boss played with a machismo swagger by Zubby Michael, and Abubakar (Lateef Adedimeji) and Casper (Nasboy, the comedian) are his saluting, praise singing capones, while Kopiko’s sister, Mighty, is only a younger, less feisty version of her. All characters look like they could have been plucked from some other Nollywood film, maybe even played by the exact same actors (see Zubby Michael in Omo Ghetto, Lateef Adedimeji in Breaded Life or Mercy Johnson in roughly half of her recent filmography).

And it gets worse when you discover that these characters, and the amount of life their actors can breathe into them, are the entire extence of the scriptwriters’ efforts to provide comic relief to the movie. It is a Nollywood tale as old as time—to gather actors with some proven comic prowess, get them to speak roughly and loudly, gesticulate wildly and generally overact, and hope that it produces a few laughs from your audience. It does not work here. And since this is primarily a comedy, having only a few scenes that can really tickle an audience will make them pay attention to the plot, of which, there really isn’t any.

There is a lot of potential, but the creators have so barely scratched it that it might be assumed they never even knew it was there. The “when posh meets street” plotline is enough fuel to create a heartwarming, enriching experience that will also deliver on solid laughs, and throwing in the extra material of having to take an unwanted trip around an unknown city should have guaranteed at least an above-average experience in the right hands.

Instead, holes (I will not add ‘plot’) abound, and the characters switch between being extremely predictable (Oscar curses Kopiko, she curses back, rinse and repeat) and bafflingly inexplicable (like when Tobe arises and goes to Terminator’s house for no reason other than the writers wanted him there). And there are more questions to be asked.
What becomes of Oscar’s girlfriend? What is his actual financial status? What exactly is Kopiko running for?, because that is not how Local Government Chairmanship elections are conducted. And how is Kopiko’s mother diagnosed with high blood pressure with symptoms of fever and chills? These last two betray a lack of effort on the part of the filmmakers, for it would have cost little to make some research and provide a more realistic experience.

But there are a few positives to pick here. Mothers on both sides—Kopiko and Oscar—have been thrown in to ramp up the emotional stakes, and Kopiko’s mother succeeds especially in opening a vulnerable side to Kopiko’s tough street armour. Cinematography and direction are beyond reproach, and acting is fine if you account for a weak script that has forced cast members into embodying loud, outsized versions of real human beings. In all this Zubby Michael must be commended specially for not needing ridiculous exaggeration to bring to life his character.

Bear in mind that none of these can substitute for good writing, and in the absence of a fleshed-out story or proper comedy, audience members may ask halfway what exactly they have come to see. I know I did. In its final 10 minutes, Passport tries to build from scratch a romance between two characters who had hardly shown such inclinations before, and the awkwardness of it really helps to drive home that feeling that its writers perhaps just brought things up as they went along. Time is precious, so while there are important lessons on humility, mutual respect and the effects of profiling to be unearthed, they are not worth the two hours it takes to get there.