Sylvester Madu, Tammy Opusunju (Mike), Nancy Isime (Angle), Lissy Gold (Vanessa), Mercy MacJoe ( Chelsea), Shasha Donald (Vera) T.T Temple (Chief Maxwell). Screenplay, Sylvester Madu; Director of Photography, Goodnews Eriko Isika; Editor, Samuel David Chinedu; Producer, Eze Osita Onyebuchi; Director, Sylvester Madu.
Once in a while, you want to see your favorite actor play a different role, just in case you discover another dimension of his character. In Stolen Corpse, we find Sylvester Madu not against the establishment like he proves in Bank Business, Bank Alert, and Jazzy but on the side of the establishment. I guess, he finds out that no one wins against city hall. He’s on the side of the law as a plain-cloth detective on the tail of a brood of gun slinging city girls who have hardly shed their wet diapers, and past the age of Cow and Gates baby food.
Stolen Corpse reminds me of More Than A Woman, a film Stephanie Okereke (Tricia), starred in as a jewelry thief. On a prowl to stake out a wealthy compound and on happenstance, she crosses path with an undercover cop, Daniel (Saint Obi), also on the road to finding the notoriously masked woman who robs jewelry stores and gets away on a motorbike. Instead of the lady wears Prada, Stephanie, with her outstanding height (I always remark on her majestic height), wears black, which makes her memorable to Daniel. Long matters shot, they eventually become husband and wife.
I always mentally recall the shock on Saint Obi’s face upon his discovery that the culprit, he and his man Rashid, are looking for, is no other than his damn. Great story that one, and now this:
Sylvester staggers when a bolt of truth hits him after finding out his wife is one of the women with the stolen corpse:
Sylvester: Everything has a beginning and has an end, except God, and you are not God, you are my wife, you are a suspect. Tell me how you got into all this?
Angle: Are you playing the tough cop or the tough husband?
Sylvester Madu proves to be the tough cop and a tough man after a blow to her jaw, and she starts talking.
Sometimes in reviewing movies, our capabilities are limited when no such film falls in the realm of the work under study. But it’s always easier when we find similar work. Every bit of Stolen Corpse reminds me of, More Than A Woman. Here in Stolen Corpse, the culprits make away with a dead man in a coffin. The motive of getting away with a dead man is not made clear as far as the third episode, except that the writer Sylvester Madu, makes me understand according to Angle’s confession that, they were on Chief Maxwell’s payroll. We live at that.
In More Than A woman, Tricia plays the lone wolf, with expertise to break into Jewellery stores and do away with her loot all by herself. She’s able to elude the detective many times. In a scene, she unexpectedly meets her husband at home, while she had on the black leather gear, and her husband jumps on her assuming the jewelry thief breaks into their home. There’s a brawl, and Daniel got beat up and fainted. She disrobes, puts the gears away, and brings him to life. There’s no such intense scene in Stolen Corpse, not even in the chase even as they labor with the coffin.
Like every one of his stories, there’s always a leftover business to settle in Sylvester Madu’s films. Either the father, the uncle, the mother or the system had wronged the character and is out on the path of vengeance, or the system is after them and therefore should fight back. Here in Stolen Corpse, Angle (Nancy Isime) is a victim of rape, whose parents (Mom and Dad) are assassinated right in front of her. She had killed her uncle before she landed in the service of Chief Maxwell as a hired assassin.
One wonders where the four women are taking the corpse. Are they going to present it to Chief Maxwell as a form of a trophy or Chief Maxwell has a pyre to burn the stolen body, so that he can rest assured his enemy is completely dead.
Up to this point in my review of films (Nollywood), the most used themes are vengeance and occult. Mostly, though, it teaches us one moral sense that what goes around comes around. The children whose fathers and mothers or parents are murdered by their business partners always avenge upon the enemies. Though Angle turns out to be a paid assassin, she got so because of the trauma she experienced when her parents get shot in front of her. The use of a mask as a symbol in film justifies the character within. Here, it doesn’t only hide the face of Angle but tells she leads a double life: A loving wife of a cop and an assassin on the outside world.
“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” Nathaniel Hawthorne (Scarlet Letter)