Skill Tech Presents: Sylvester Madu (Jazzy), Onyeka Emechebe (Becca), Angel Ufuoma (Clara), Frank Acheben (Fred). Director, AMANASA Nnamdi; Producer, Grace Nnachi; Editor, Onwaka Rowland; Samuel did not tolerate Chidiebere; Screenplay, Grace Nnachi. C 2016.
Jazzy 1-4, the 2016 film is a remarkable work of Sunny Nnamdi, the Director and the ingenious screenwriter, Amara Nnachi. Their production here deserves a five-star accolade. I have to do this to get them out of my system, for they did a remarkable job with this movie, and I don’t believe they deserve sidelining by any means.
My attention to this film was taken by the lead actor, Sylvester Madu (Jazzy). The first time I saw the work of Sylvester Madu was the 2010 production of Bank Business. I saw him as the new breed of Nollywood actors. No, not the Jim Iyke, or the clean-cut, Noah. I’m thinking in the realm of the steely eyes, dirty face, and the lankiness of Clint Eastwood in the American cowboy films. Madu has the gut to dare; he can take the risk; he knows how to handle guns like it was made for him, and he’s good with it as well as his dialogue.
In Jazzy, his screen name reminds me of Jazzman in Bank Business. Here, he teams up with Becca (Onyeka Emechebe) and his younger brother Fred (Frank Acheben), another actor on my watch list, to form a desperate gang of thieves with money on their mind and murder in their eyes. They kill their victims, like wading flies, in the process of every heist and make away with the loot. They had pulled a thirty million naira heist and are taking a break when perchance, they save an epileptic, Clara (Angel Ufuoma) from dying in her car. Jazzy falls in love at first sight, even to the disdain of Becca. As of the onset of Clara coming into their lives, Becca feels Clara will cause their doom, and rightly so.
Clara’s mother after finding her only daughter in the company of a gang of murderers and thieves, by then pregnant for Jazzy, calls the police on the crew. Upon learning that Clara is carrying Jazzy’s baby, Becca is cut short of murdering her. From that point, the begrudged, disgruntled, and angry Becca breaks camp and becomes a police informant against Jazzy and Fred.
As in Bank Business, his only sister Stephanie Okerere, accidentally runs into him and together with hand picked girls, forms a gun-toting riff-raff girls to pull a bank heist. It goes sour. In Bank Business, Sylvester Madu, and Stephanie Okerere, have a beef with the system which could not protect their parents from armed robbery and never even investigated their murders. He and his sister go separate ways, one become a gangster, and another, a prostitute, until they meet in the most unexpected circumstances. Whereas in Bank Business, the detective in charge of the case, Yul Edochie, knew his culprit. In Jazzy, the police didn’t know who is behind the heists and killings, until Becca snitches on the gang and becomes an informant.
Here in Jazzy, it takes lots of events and dramatic art to come to conclusion, and which also, all the more makes Jazzy far more intense than Bank Business. Like I said from the start of this review about Sylvester Madu, he’s the Clint Eastwood of Nollywood. Watch every one of his movies, you won’t regret any, only that you have to wait until the children go to bed before pressing, play on your set, for blood and gore reign supreme in his movies.
There’s one similarity here between Bank Business and Jazzy that I think is no coincident. The lead player, Sylvester Madu in Bank Business, is called, Jazzman. It surprises me that the next blockbuster lead in which Sylvester Madu plays the lead is also named, Jazzy. It could be a marketing ploy to call our attention to Sylvester Madu’s character in Jazzy. But to a seasoned viewer of Nollywood films, the face of Sylvester Madu’s on every scabbard is enough to gravitate his followers. I will.