Black Mail

Cel­e­brat­ed screen hard­man Ray Chin­da (OC Uke­je) is hav­ing a real­ly bad time of it: the spice has been drained from his rela­tion­ship; he’s addict­ed to inter­net porn; he’s los­ing the con­nec­tion to his kids; and a gang of Russ­ian cyber­hack­ers have sent him a lit­tle black­mail note ask­ing for cash, oth­er­wise they pri­vate drop wank footage to his Face­book page – if that’s even pos­si­ble! The shame of it all is real­ly bring­ing him down.

The fight­back is slow and steady, and it helps that the Rus­sians have var­i­ous side hus­tles in sex traf­fick­ing and rap­ing col­leagues that begin to dis­rupt their well-oiled oper­a­tion. Chin­da soon sees a path to tak­ing own­er­ship of his self-abus­ing ways, par­lay­ing some of his film fight chore­og­ra­phy into real-life crime fight­ing, and dis­cov­er that the inter­net isn’t just a hate-filled cesspool of humil­i­a­tion and misery.

Vet­er­an Nol­ly­wood direc­tor Obi Emel­onye throws every­thing in the pot and more for this zip­pi­ly-paced urban thriller which makes up in mox­ie what it lacks in finesse. His MO as a writer and direc­tor is that, if one idea appears to be run­ning out of steam, then quick, let’s chuck anoth­er one up there, as this 90 minute dash ends up cov­er­ing a sur­pris­ing­ly vast amount of ground. Per­haps a lit­tle too much, when it comes to a third act twist in which the cen­tral con­flict is sud­den­ly placed in an even wider and dark­er context.

The per­for­mances across the board are good enough to keep things put­ter­ing along, even if there are a few clunky minor sup­port­ing roles (main­ly police offi­cers) where it does feel like actors have been giv­en one take to read some stock lines off a white­board that sits just off cam­era. And the edit­ing and cin­e­matog­ra­phy have enough of a slick sheen to pass the film off as a ritzi­er pack­age than it per­haps is.

Polit­i­cal­ly, the film is very hap­py to stig­ma­tise porn addic­tion and push an aggres­sive­ly con­ser­v­a­tive pro-fam­i­ly mes­sage, treat­ing Chinda’s chron­ic anx­i­ety and pangs of self-hatred as lit­tle more than treat­able per­son­al weak­ness­es that can be fixed by a soft­ly-spo­ken psy­chi­a­trist, or just sup­pressed for the remain­der of his days. Yet there is some­thing quite refresh­ing and truth­ful about a film in which a man is tar­get­ed by cyber crim­i­nals and is com­plete­ly con­fused and naïve about how he should thwart their efforts.

It’s com­pul­sive­ly watch­able hokum, some­times earnest, some­times daft, but always try­ing to reach beyond its grasp. And there’s no rea­son why Emel­onye wouldn’t make the tran­si­tion from Nol­ly­wood to Hol­ly­wood in the next decade or so.