Inkblot Productions/Closer Pictures present, Majid Michel (Nnamdi Okoye), Osos Ighadaro (Tolu Okoye), Desmond Elliot (Effiong Akpodigha), Jide Okoso (Chief), Kenneth Okoli (Moses), Saheed Funky Mallam (Shehun Aminu), Seun Akindele (Hakeem), Udoka Oyeka (James Okolo), O.C Okeje (Segun). Director of Photography, Ayoola Ireyomi; Producer, Uduak Isong Oguamanam/Chinaza Onuzo; Executive Producer, Chinaza Onuzo; Co-Producer, Jason Rogers; Asst. Director, Obinna Ohazulike; Director, Remi Vaughan-Richards; Screenplay, Chinaza Onuzo. (C) 2015
A friend of mine is already addicted to Nollywood movies. He’s an American but he has heard so many stories about electronic scammers, and he’s afraid to use his credit cards to buy anything from Africa. Most logins where he could buy Nollywood movies online don’t do business through PayPal. He wishes they could. Gone were the days we had chicken thieves, bicycle thieves, and thieves who storm our barns in the middle of the night and steal away our annual yam savings. Today, Africa is proud to present electronic scammers and corporate thieves.
I made a statement in my review of the film, Secrets of the Night that caper films formula works best when the lead player character, because of his/her ingenuity, is hauled from retirement to join the gang one last time. That member always forms the crack or the fault line among the water-tight gang of thieves. They drag her from retirement because she has the criminal Midas touch: No safe is safe enough for her; no computer firewall could prevent her from breaking into secured accounts; she volunteers to join the gang again out of fun and away from boredom. The stashed away might be merely dwindling, and that could have the adverse effect on the lifestyle of the once rich and famous criminal. So, she volunteers.
Nnamdi Okoye (Majid Mitchel) and his wife, Tolu Okoye (Osos Ighadaro) accept a visit from Segun (O.C Ukeje), and he offers them a deal of 50 million Naira a piece, to help subdue Camden into selling the firm to Titan Manufacturing Corporation. Segun’s visit and his offering such a whopping sum of money plant a seed of discord between Nnamdi and Tolu in their quiet Ibadan home and life. Soon, they’re standing at each other’s throat, fussing with each other for the life that doesn’t exist in the first place. Tolu feels bored. She misses the high-wire adrenaline drenched operations and the big hauls of money and laughs at her husband about the idea of her taking a job with a bank.
Tolu sneaks from his bed and runs back to Lagos to join the gang. Segun has his eyes on the money but also on Tolu. The worst thing one could do to Nnamdi is to stand between him and his wife, especially since it’s his natural obligation to take her from harm’s way no matter how lucrative that venture could be. He has had enough of the adventures in crime and moved out to Ibadan to quietly retire and sets up a construction company. Tolu is welcome back at TMC and puts as usual, in charge of operations to sabotage Camden. But Nnamdi loves his wife too much to let her join the gang, and not even gets close to Segun by any means. He plans alternative sabotage, by confessing to Effiong and the plan by TMC to buy Camden by the same method that leads to the capitulation of True Logistic, his company.
Majid takes his Bruce Willis’ Die Hard, form. The corporate underground secret department is out to get him dead or alive, and he’s out to sabotage their effort as long as he gets his wife back from their grip. Effiong is now on his side, and the only card he needs to complete his mission is his wife, Tolu. That is easy. Tolu still loves her husband, and the stakes get higher when Chief (Jide Kosoko) gives her the ultimatum to divorce her husband in exchange for a place on the board of Titan Manufacturing Corp. She can’t buy into his trick.
Nnamdi and Efiong team up together against TMC and its gang of thieves in their electronic scam to blackmail Camden. Already, Tolu introduces Effiong to the owner of Camden, Sehun Aminu (Saheed Funky Mallam), and he, in turn, recruits Tolu unknown to the TMC and Chief’s gang. Instead of bombing oil pipes and torching rigs in his oilfields, TMC resorts to hacking Camden’s electronics system, and the best person in the outfit for that is none other than Tolu, but she’s already sold out to Camden for which her husband now works. In the end, the table turns: Chief is in a corner: TMC is forced, in fact, blackmailed into buying Camden for 100 million dollars, Chief and TMC crew must leave Tolu and Nnamdi alone; Effiong must retain a fifty percent shares in TMC, and thirty percent goes to Chief. Upon this condition, Tolu will not expose Chief to FCC.
The beauty of The Department is the structure of the story. We have seen stories of blackmails, hostages, kidnappings and bank heists but the grit of all these is always in the story structure. The Department, plotline involving Nnamdi and his wife, carries the story to the finish. Tolu retires briefly from the world of crime, but she’s thrown back into it because they needed a hacker at the cost of 50 million Naira, and hacking is her stock in trade. Nnamdi goes after her into Lagos and gets himself inadvertently into the mix, only this time not for money and not to join them, but to rescue his wife from the grip of TMC and its gang.
Nnamdi-Effiong axis versus Chief-Tolu shifty alliance makes The Department memorable. Nnamdi had been one of the perpetrators who had woke Effiong up in the middle of the night and held him and his family at gunpoint. As the only signatory to over hundred million Nairas savings in his company, True Logistic account, Effiong signs it away to an unknown group of people, which caused his capitulation, and eventual selling out to Titan Manufacturing Corporation. But just now, Nnamdi’s pleading with Effiong to help him redeem his wife, Tolu from the claws and jaws of the same secret department he has worked. For compensation, he reveals to Effiong the plan afoot to capitulate Camden by TMC. Even though in the process, Nnamdi confesses to Effiong the part he had played in the assault on his savings and company, he sees it Nnamdi’s way and team up with him against Chief and The Department.
Tolu has brains unmatched by any of the gang members in the outfit. They know so, and she knows so, too. She joins the operation on her terms: They shouldn’t touch her husband at all. Chief agrees, but Tolu doesn’t trust him and therefore plays the double standard by going over to work for Camden, on the pretext of undermining and hacking Shehun Aminu’s electronic system. She has enough evidence already to implicate Chief in industrial espionage to the FCC. The Chief wants her, Effiong and Nnamdi murdered.
There’s lots of mind game at play in this movie. I only wish Secrets of the Night have such beautiful structure. Of course, the gang in Secrets of the Night kidnap Henry’s daughter, though, briefly and the best friend of Tessy, his wife, gets inadvertently killed in the armed robbery that went wrong. Those two incidents heightened the crime drama. The Department employs a higher stake: Nnamdi versus his wife; Nnamdi, seeking help from Effiong to redeem his wife; Nnamdi versus TMC and The Department; Tolu versus Chief and The Department, and Tolu’s reconciliatory actions with her husband. The tension in The Department is more than the Secrets of the Night. We all remember that the movie, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) was about a scam of this kind. To brief you, it’s a story about the rise and fall of Enron through Ponzi scheme. Titan Manufacturing Corporation’s rise and fall engineered by the secret department couldn’t say more.