By Henry Akubuiro
Jude Idada’s thriller, Kofa, may be wafer-thin in plot, compared to its almost two-hour, screen duration, but the dizzying scenes of kidnapped oil workers in captivity, reduced to moaning muppets and grappling with loss of identity, with no clue how to get out of the plight, makes sure the curious audience doesn’t walk away with a twee feeling.
The plot helming, especially the twists, by Jude Idada, who doubles as the director of the movie, is top draw. For a greater part of the thriller, the kidnapped victims are shut out from daylight, stripped half naked in a cell. Every passing hour is an albatross. Despair hangs in the air.
One after another, a murderer, in a bloodstained ensemble, walks into the cell to pick a captive, perhaps to kill. Resistance is met with highhandedness by the ferocious beast. In the cell, fear is silhouetted darkly in every corner.
Gradually, the captives begin to come back to their senses, remembering who they were before they were captured. It happens in fits and starts, setting the cats among the pigeons. There is no certainty as to what transpired and why, and that sets the imagination running towards a seagull approach by the traducers at large.
Kofa, amid the gloomy mood in the movie, offers the viewer some lewd scenes but without raunchy sex. Dangling breasts aren’t concealed. Bulging John Thomas is a familiar sight. The movie leaves it real, without promoting depravity, though. Lest we forget, two lovebirds are among the kidnapped, and they refuse to play the mannequin.
Intermittently, the control room tracking the captives scans the entire Lagos metropolis, showing a beautiful scenery and narrowing the search to Apapa GRA, where the kidnapped oil workers are held. If you think they are about to be rescued by security personnel, the moviemaker leaves it as a cliffhanger till the remaining two in captivity summon courage to accost the bully.
It appears a little too late, though they succeed in overwhelming him. Welcome to freedom: that’s your bid for the benumbed souls. But they are surprised to walk into the reception to discover they had been, all along, together with their colleagues, used as guinea pigs for a memory loss test and troupers for the screen.
The movie shows the actors and actresses converging again and undergoing training as if they were about to take on the Sambisa hirelings somewhere in the northeast, for echoes of missing Chibok girls and Boko Haram felons are juxtaposed. What a braggadocio!
However, the movie is going in another direction. Jude Idada himself puts up a cameo performance as a maverick politician, who has gone to meet Boko Haram men with a suitcase of hard currency, in appreciation of their heists, kidnappings and reign of terror in the land. There is also a maiden offered by an emir for the leader of the mujahideens. But she is just a decoy assailant to assassinate the top dogs.
Kofa is a solution driven movie on how to free the Chibok girls and end the northeast insurgency. It establishes the nexus between the political and royal classes in Nigeria and the Sambisa gunmen. If there is a will power, as demonstrated towards the end of the movie, the coda of the macabre dance in the land will surely be muted permanently.
In terms of delivery, Idada’s Kofa puts you in a Maserati flying boldly through a mistral. It’s frank yet brutal. Kofa, which was screened recently at Movie House, Lekki, Lagos, featured, among others, Kate Henshaw, Daniel Etim Effiong, Beverly Naya, Zainab Balogun, Bucci Franklin and Shawn Faqua, in the cast.
Worthy of note is the graceful performance by Etim Effiong (as Wale) in the movie. The duality of role, from a lover boy to a messiah in the face of adversity, is off the hook. He seamlessly redefined the fortune of the movie with panache, deserving of all the accolades.