By Ali Baylay
Cast:Emeka Ike, Van Vicker, Prince Ike, Tonto Dikeh; Produced by Pressing Forward Productions; Black Star Entertainment; Screenplay: Greg Chyke Inawodoh. 145 Minutes.
There’re really guys like this: wise guys, fast talking, tough-talking, smooth-talking and confident- building guys who can present before you a heaven on earth. They’re not your 9 to 5 kind of guys. They live by scamming, pilfering, lying, deceiving and robbing, peddling guns and drugs. They’re the best dressed, they hang out with big shots-governors, ministers, bank managers, board of directors; and they shop for, and use beautiful women and later wad them off like flies, and beside the cordon of securities, there’s always one henchman hanging around them with a briefcase full of money. These days in modern African countries, stringent financial difficulties creates certain nostalgia for their brand of lifestyle-easy living.
Andy (Emeka Ike) is a medical doctor who cannot find job or client so he can feed himself, as he sits lamenting and soliloquizing in his little scantily dressed apartment. Then saunters in Emeka (Prince Eke), dejectedly looking after another interview flop. While both are blaming their misfortunes on the government and their gods, then comes in Jerry (Van Vicker) who is offered N15000 for a job not quite made clear in the film. These three characters assumingly bunk together in this apartment. At certain point they look like the three stoogies.
Their luck soon change when per chance Andy saves a client’s life from heart attack and this client, Chief Braimor happens to be a big time drug dealer. Being poor, and down on their lucks the three idlers soon become Chief Braimor’s drug delivery people. The three are still living together, except their condition has changed a notch up, and we see them showering party girls with lots of nairas and dollar bills at a private party, in their new marble floor apartment.
Here’s where Marshals as a story has pitfalls: First,the story doesn’t justify the title. We see Jerry and Emeka ones in the traffic, each with a briefcase, one getting in a car, and the other on a bike. What makes them become marshals doesn’t have to be just a single shot of delivery. What happens to the principle of three in story telling? I did not see any action out of the ordinary (eg. mob) that could make them marshals for what they do except seeing them getting in traffic.
There’s too much telling and no showing: We never ever see what the said marshals are trading in (cocaine, pills, marijuana, counterfeit etc), nor the type of people they do business with. There’s no establishment of link between Andy, Emeka and Jerry. All these do not have history to connect them together except the fact that they live in one bedroom apartment. Lastly, the plot line involving Cathy (Tonto Dikeh) takes so much steam out of this lackluster story. I wonder why this plot is necessary because it doesn’t move the story at all. Excuse me if Andy’s gonna fall in love with her, or she’ll hire Emeka to kill Chief Braimor, in part 3, but that remain to be seen.
Until I see part 3 and see these interactions in the resolution, Marshals does not measure to its name. Indeed not all. I can guess here the writer’s aim for this story is to take a pardoxical shot at the ills of our society, and which is somehow achieved. But as a story form, and structure, the goal is not achieved.