To Kill a Monkey

A Gentle Critique

One bittersweet irony haunts the arts: a master’s fame often peaks at the very point their mastery begins to wane. The David Fincher who made The Social Network and Gone Girl, the Bong Joon Ho who made Memories of Murder and Parasite, and the Jade Osiberu who made Isoken and The Trade all died after those masterpieces came to life. Here, in this moment, the Kemi Adetiba who made King of Boys isn’t the same one who’s given us the spectacularly terrible To Kill a Monkey.

I have no misgivings about what’s about to come after the colon: this series is bad. It is the worst thing I have seen since Shanty Town and Saltburn. The only contemporary Nollywood direct-to-streaming release I’d recommend anyone unfortunately interested in seeing it to watch at twice the normal speed without feeling any moral scruples. In the carcass of that 8-hour footage lay a 2-hour 20-minute crime thriller/drama that could’ve easily been an instant Nollywood classic. Instead, we get something more tedious, slow, and sedative than Master Oogway’s voice streaming through a badly tuned radio. Play this series for the Teletubbies and they will wither and die.

How to Almost Nearly Kill a Dead Monkey that has Already Died

Believe it or not, this is a crime thriller, a crime thriller where we never see a crime and never feel a thrill. That, in itself, is quite the feat: the absolute absence of a thing’s marketed and aesthetic essence.

Before I go for the jugular, before I break apart the mishandling of both genres, let’s talk about the story. To Kill a Monkey follows Efenimi (William Benson), a struggling computer first-class graduate who becomes a fraudster to take care of his family and gets caught in a crossfire between his boss, Oboz (Bucci Franklin), and a rival fraudster (Chidi Mokeme), and a dogged cybercrime investigator (Bimbo Akintola). A simple enough plot, what could go wrong? Every single thing.

It’s too long. With sharper writing or editing, the first two episodes could’ve been cut into one. The point of the opener—to introduce the incident(s) that’ll force the protagonist into a life of crime—is postponed and postponed through unnecessary and near-repetitive events meant for the audience to garner sympathy for him or see him as a good person even after making the choice he’ll eventually have to make.

Not since Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life have I witnessed a protagonist suffer trauma after trauma for spectacle’s sake, or, in this case, as justification for the main character to take a not-so-drastic decision in the opening. In Severance, the Apple TV series, Mark, the protagonist, opts for the severance procedure in the wake of his wife’s death. The grief powers his resolve to take on such a drastic and controversial move, one where his waking self will have a split identity from his working self. To find a more analogous symmetry, Dylan, another character from the series whose struggle mirrors Efe’s in TKAM, chooses to undergo the procedure after being unable to secure a job for the longest time. We’re shown a handful of scenes where he suffers multiple discriminatory acts and a general sense of bad luck, and voila, we’re in. He goes for it. And it’s justified.

Not Efe; Efe, a father with a pregnant wife, who is unable to secure a job. We don’t jump to the scene where he meets who will change his fate. Nope. He gets sexually assaulted twice. By the same person, his boss. This isn’t even explored beyond that. It’s just shoehorned in there for no other reason than for the audience to watch him suffer. Okay, he’s coerced into it the first time to secure money to help pay for his wife’s emergency C-section operation. This could’ve been the catalyst to set him up for the meeting with Oboz, given the shoddy treatment of the sexual assault, how it never comes up again in the series, compared to how Inspector Ogunlesi’s grief morphs into a full-on psychosis that makes her flinch every single time she appears on screen.

Given Nigeria’s high maternal mortality rate and Efe’s family’s lower class in the society, the stakes are as high as can be imagined for him and them. A woman pregnant with triplets. An emergency C-section. Four lives hanging in the balance. A man in debt. Too many clocks are already simultaneously ticking. But, no. Efe loses the money in the keke. A man who’s been living in Lagos all his life holds a brown envelope to his chest at night. He’s apprehensive of the keke, but he does nothing to dissuade the apprehension; he enters the keke, nonetheless, and gets robbed.

Such masterful writing. What a superb sequence of events. And why was his wife admitted into such an affluent hospital in the first place? Where did someone whose salary isn’t up to minimum wage get the funds to afford monthly antenatal care in such a high-end facility? These questions aren’t addressed; instead, we pivot, once again, to rape. Apparently, when it comes to women, Nollywood, the male directors to be exact, shoot gratuitous rape scenes—often filmed to make it look sexy, indulgent—and show, hopefully much later, how it impacts the characters in question, but when it comes to men, Nollywood cuts away (tactful) but never shows how it affects the character.

In fact, following the film’s logic, sexual assault does nothing harmful to men. They chest it and move on without consequence. It doesn’t complicate sex for them moving forward. It’s just one of those things, you know? A gross mishandling that bungles what could’ve been a great opportunity to explore rape in the form of coercion involving a woman as the perpetrator, a framing which would’ve challenged bioessentialist notions of rape, a stance that’d’ve been interesting to observe in Nigerian media, given how binary feminist thought/critique of patriachy often is in the mainstream.

Rather, Efe suffers some bonanza humiliations before he meets his helper, Oboz-the-bozz, a fraudster whom Efe (a spineless coward, mind you) once saved from a cultist attack back in his uni days, Oboz who clears the debt that got Efe in the position to get sexually assaulted by his boss, Oboz who shows Efe (a one-time result forger, too; don’t forget) his lair where he carries out his cybercrime operations.

Efe rejects Oboz’s offer out of some vague, inane sense of morality. It is a useless and pointless dismissal that stalls the story because Efe is neither as self-righteous as portrayed nor ingenious enough to come up with an alternative solution. It’s the first hint at his sheer naivety.

Oboz’s generosity in this moment also stalls the inevitable. In a way, Efe’s reluctance was more strategic for the audience: the moment he joined Oboz, the story went completely off the rails. He was trying, it can be argued, to protect the audience from the utter, sophisticated nonsense that was about to unfold.

I could forgive many things in this show, but everything is none of them. Why, tell me, does a crime drama not show any crime? In Peaky Blinders, we see how the gang fixes races; in Money Heist and Lupin, we are shown how a heist is staged; in the fucking Godfather, which this movie takes cues from, we see how the Mafia operates. Yet, the only glimpse we get in TKAM of how Yahoo works is a ritual scene in the opening. The broody scene we later see in one of Oboz’s cells not only gives little to no information about how the fraudulent business operates, but it also undermines the necessity of Efe’s idea when you think critically about it in relation to reality. Anyone who knows anything about how Yahoo functions in Nigeria knows Oboz, deducing from the little we get, had more than a good thing going.

From the sweeping montage, you could decipher that the light-skinned girls (making what I presume to be video calls with clients) are carrying on a dating scam, but the real kicker is the guy with his foot on a tortoise, a nod to Yahoo plus, which is an extreme part of the cybercrime business where a shrine priest grants the scammer powers. These powers come with conditions, conditions that help the Yahoo boys scam their clients without having to fake an accent to swindle their clients. Most Yahoo Plus boys are the richest, as this part of the crime intersects neatly with human trafficking, ritual killing, and sex trafficking.

None of this is explored. We never see how the scams are carried out. We never see how Efe’s plan is implemented. And how, for fuck’s sake, does someone who’s only forged results as a one-time gig suddenly have a plan, an idea, a software that can rake in billions of naira, just like that? The show implies Efe is smart without providing any substantial evidence and posits, by proxy, that defrauding people is a walk in the park, an enterprise that requires no special skill set, moral decay, or an intimate understanding of how the Yahoo scene functions.

We never learn about the types of scams that exist within this crime sector; we never learn their modus operandi: what apps they use, how they move money, how they launder said money, on what they spend this money on; we never get to explore Yahoo fashion; we never learn or hear their slangs and vocabulary for trade staples (pickers, loaders, clients, percentages); and another missed opportunity that shows how unfamiliar the creator probably is with the Yahoo scene is: we never get to hear Yahoo music, even though the country has a long history of such songs, ranging from Olu Maintain’s Yahooze to Kelly Handsome’s Maga Don Pay, and the more recent Bella Shmurda’s Cash App and Shallipopi’s Elon Musk. We learn quickly, surely, fatally that To Kill a Monkey is interested in Yahoo as hearsay, Yahoo as backdrop, Yahoo as this nebulous thing where people get into it and come out swanky, rich, and spoiled.

Internal Logic In Absentia

A planted bomb goes off in a gated compound, and the laws of physics exit through the back door. The Teacher’s rigged car explodes, sending no shockwaves in any direction, not even towards the Teacher and his daughter, both standing a few feet away from the explosion. Yet, in the next scene, the series detracts from this fatal error and shows a bleary-eyed Teacher seated on the steps, his body covered in soot and char. Which is it? Did the explosion have an impact beyond the impact zone or not?

The deaths the plot demands are granted with ease; the deaths the story implies are stalled, waylaid, postponed. Inspector Ogunlesi’s family’s death could’ve been tied to Oboz’s boys, thereby cementing and justifying her motive for hunting down the Monkey crime syndicate. Rather, her family is killed off only to engineer a situation where she’d have been present in the hospital to have a chance encounter with Efe. I can’t overstate how lazy and uninspired that framing is because we’re given a story where Ogunlesi’s primary motive is to prove to Superintendent Babalola, her former colleague turned boss, that she’s capable of doing her job despite her mental illness, which the inspector clearly hasn’t healed from. Just why?

Also, the plot is incredibly juvenile and stupid and only works because every character in this series is as naive as an infant and as thoughtless as a doorknob. A rival fraudster sends a mole to Efe’s daughter’s birthday, puts the girl in a freezer, and sends Efe the picture. She survives. The whole thing’s a setup, a warning. Oboz, on the other hand, escapes an assassination attempt by the skin of his teeth. Oboz invites Efe to hash things over. He tells Efe he knows who’s responsible, and Efe, insulted by his boss’s initial proclaimed ignorance about the perpetrator, lashes out and disrespects Oboz.

The conflict is defused by Idia (Lilian Afegbai) as she dismisses Oboz’s goons, so Efe and his boss can have a private conversation. I have never seen such a terrible portrayal of established power dynamics in forever.

The real world functions thus: within a crime syndicate, anger that blossoms into public disrespect for one’s boss without substantial leverage or garnered clout, as in the onset of a coup, is a death wish that comes almost instantly or with an assigned due date. Righteous anger does not justify dissent. People have lost their lives for less. Forgiveness isn’t miraculously arrived at after a few hard glances. Public disrespect is only forgiven by public humiliation. This scene is even more unbelievable when it’s taken into consideration that Oboz is a former cultist. There’s no reason whatsoever why Efe shouldn’t have faced severe consequences. His proposition after the fact is naive. His anger, misplaced. His motive, spurious. I have to stop somewhere because every episode came with its own unbelievable yet unchallenged reason why the show must go on.

The Gala of the Endlessly Gullible

All the characters in To Kill a Monkey are newscasters, and the series is a video podcast. Unlike the even more garrulous characters of Shonda, Sorkin, and Tarantino, Kemi’s characters are pure synopsis swappers. Ogunlesi accosts every character she encounters with how she lost her family; Efe tells us who he is, what his motives are, where his loyalties lie over and over; Sparkles tells us a long-winded story about all the things that happened to her and all the things she’ll never do, all of which she ends up doing in the following episodes; Oboz tells us how much of a brother Efe is to him even though we never see it. Every character raps off summaries of events to come, events that played out off-screen, and events happening as we witness them. As a result, the audience is forced to sit through eight hours of lackluster exposition. If I had a gun, I’d have shot myself in the foot to feel something.

There are six Efes in this show—the drunk, the terrible seducer, the self-righteous bastard, the fraudster in denial, the destitute first-class graduate, the cheating family man—and all of them are naive. “You are so judgmental and naive,” says Efe, the most judgmental and naive character, to Ogunlesi, the second most naive character in the show, only slightly more gullible than Sparkles. The show’s plot runs entirely on naivety. Oboz was naive to not only forgive Efe but to believe Efe’s naive plan would suffice to defeat the only character in the show who wasn’t naive: Teacher, a man who seems to be the only one who understands how the crime world functions, who knows what a vendetta is, who knows how to follow through with mutiny. This isn’t to say I was impressed by his character, either. He is a conglomeration of villains and their paraphernalia from other crime series.

After the grand introduction we’re given of Sparkles, we are forced to sit and watch this alleged street-smart babe who’s not afraid to stare down the barrel of a gun get “seduced” by Efe until she begins to play doorstep delivery Lady Macbeth to Efe in order to get Oboz eliminated by Teacher, whose father she nurses to health as a bargaining chip. Just as the mediocre cannot spot mediocrity, the naive cannot see through naivety, thus Sparkles tethers herself to a man who she couldn’t suspect was about to abandon her while she was acting a bootleg Phantom Thread with him, feeding him pills to sedate him and wean her over to his side, away from his wife, Nosa. A street-smart babe could not beware the man who tries to save everyone but himself. You know what? I am tired.

Let’s Wrap This Shit Up Because I Have Cupcakes To Go and Buy

A game is only as good as its stakes are high and how thoroughly its rules are implemented. A good story follows the same logic. TKAM breaks nearly all its promises. It is so full of inconsistencies. The show even refuses to follow reality: why does Sparkles test positive for pregnancy when it takes 8-10 weeks of pregnancy for a urine test to become viable, as that’s the window when chorionic gonadotropin, the hormone the test scans for, becomes detectable? A criminal working in Nigeria decides to take out Efe by shooting him in court when he could’ve easily paid the ever-bribable police officers to kill him in prison?

How was Ogunlesi able to forge Babalola’s signature without a referent? Did she simply memorize her superintendent’s signature? And even if the boy in question wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference, why would Babalola not make reference to the fact? How, also, was Ogunlesi, a cybercrime expert, ignorant about the inner workings of Yahoo, to the point where she was surprised thirteen-year-olds were being forced into the business? Even I, without all the intel in the world, know that people as young as nine are being conscripted into the nefarious trade.

I haven’t seen a show where the protagonist harps on and on about family since the Fast and Furious franchise, but it isn’t family-oriented. Even the kidnapper from The Trade is more of a family man than Efe. At least, Dominic Toretto has courage and grit, while Efe is a spineless coward and Oboz, a philandering father looking for a brother in a lost man who rejects alcohol because he has no liver; who is so brilliant, he’s a fool.

I won’t even talk about the spelling and typographical errors in the subtitles. I’ll allow the serfs to marvel at the serifs: the grand costumes, the lush sets, the spectacular special effects, the makeup and wigs and purses and gowns and heels and nails, the wonderful sound design, the haunting score, the inspired acting from both male leads. We are too blinded by glitter. Mediocrity is the eighth deadly sin, and Nollywood commits it as a pastime. The summary of it all: this series is bad. 3/10.