To Kill a Monkey: Kemi Adetiba’s overwhelming Lagos crime tale

Every movie director has a cinematic signature, visual and thematic cues that define their oeuvre; you expect grit and crime from Martin Scorsese, maudlin sentimentality from Pedro Almodovar and mind-bending innovation from Christopher Nolan.

Kemi Adetiba, famous for King of Boys, is engraving hers with cinematic offerings that cast a harsh searchlight on the seedy and the shady. That signature is apparent in her new offering which has topped the charts on Nigerian Netflix for over a month.

To Kill a Monkey, her eight episode series, is wide-ranging and conceived on a grand scale, blending family stories, poverty, insanity and the underworlds of cybercrime and corruption.

The story follows Efemini – “Efe” (William Benson) – a brilliant tech graduate stuck in a dead-end job in Egbeda, Lagos. Bereft of opportunities, he suffers indignities as he strives to cater for his family while nurturing dreams of selling his artificial intelligence and malware software to a tech company.

But life has other plans. When he meets a charismatic cybercriminal, Oboz (Bucci Franklin), an acquaintance from his university days, Efe is drawn into a crime syndicate. Tired of humiliation and ignominy, he weaponises his brilliance to become the gang’s tech mastermind.

Meanwhile, the activities of the syndicate have caught the attention of the Nigerian Cybercrime Commission. Inspector Motunrayo “Mo” Ogunlesi (Bimbo Akintola), haunted by personal loss, becomes obsessed with “The Monkey Case”. Her pursuit of justice clashes violently with a compromised system, and with Efe, whose moral compass has lost its true north.

How much can a man take?

To Kill a Monkey is a revelatory and cautionary tale on how failures of policy can destroy ambition and corrupt morals. This is explored through Efe’s descent. Efe doesn’t wake up wanting to be a fraudster; he’s pushed deeper into moral ruin by a cocktail of escalating disappointments and indignities. Watching him get beat down by life and people, one wonders how much one man can take before he snaps?

When he entreats Oboz to “abeg cut soap for me” we see a man who has reached the end of his tether.

But in his capitulation lies a moral conundrum.

Despite its compelling premise, the series suffers, in places, from overwrought writing. Adetiba complicates the narrative by introducing new plotlines and characters. Parts of the show could have benefited from refinement, such as more precise editing, restrained acting, tighter subplots, and more polished dialogue.

The introduction of the Teacher (Chidi Mokeme), a brutal crime boss, is meant to raise the stakes, but it jars.

The pacing of To Kill A Monkey varies considerably. The first and second episodes do a nice job of establishing Efe’s dilemmas. However, the middle episodes feel a bit drawn-out, slowing down the momentum. The final episode, by contrast, rushes through to its conclusion.

Performances range from captivating to excessive. William Benson’s portrayal of Efe is convincing and his slow descent into an immoral abyss is deeply affecting while Bucci Franklin brings charm and menace to Oboz, whose Mephistophelian manipulations compel attention. Stella Damasus returns to form as Efe’s long suffering wife.

To Kill a Monkey is an important if flawed exploration of a nation at a crossroads between innovation and potential downfall. What emerges at the end is a bold, bruising and thrilling revelation of a society where talent collides with circumstance, and survival often means embracing what you once loathed.