YN Productions presents Yvonne Nelson (Julia), Adjetey Annan (Akeemy), Kunle Remi (Phil), Oscar Provencalv (Ruddy), Michelle Hammond (Florence), Kweku Elliot (Clem), Regina Van-Helvel (Tess), Alhaji Fadika (Fred Amponsah), Isaac Akwesi Awonor (Rufus), Rosy Meurer (Rivera). Producer/Executive Producer Yvonne Nelson; Director, Pascal Amanfo; Director of Photography, Tunde Adekoya; Story/Screenplay by Pascal Amanfo. © 2019
Barely one minute and point thirty seconds into Sin City, Pascal Amanfo, introduces us to Phil and Julia, and a mother-in-law in a brand-new crème-colored living room. Freeze frame the shot: The excited young wife straps her legs around the midriff of her husband, as the mother-in-law sits on the couch looking on with a broad smile. It is a perfect advertisement postcard picture for realtors luring young and affluent couples to buy their properties. The concept is indicative of a happy future home for a young middle-class, with enough room for a kid or two to play.
Now let’s thaw out the picture frame. The writer introduces us to Attorney Philip (Kunle Remi) and his stay-home) wife, Julia (Yvonne Nelson). Phil goes away from home quite often. We capture in a rigid frame, one of his arrivals, when Julia jumped and wraps her legs around his midriff, smoldering him with kisses. Stay-home, wife, I said. She wants a vacation anywhere, someplace and anyhow. Because, “You know, we really need it. Marriage sometimes can be so boring, and we need to find some spark sometimes.” she instigates her husband.
The hotel welcomes the arrival of the couple with traditional dances to which Julia gyrated her beautiful plum body to the rhythm of the drums. Next, the hostess, Tess (Regina Van-Helvel), promises the couple an exclusive couple’s fantasy night, which she refuses to elaborate when Phil asks her. “I’ll wait for the surprise,” Julia said, excited. She sends them a bottle of champaign to their room. The two love birds are rollicking and enjoying every bit of this vacation. In the elevator, Julia gives a gratuitous kiss to Phil: “I’m glad we’re doing this. It means so much to me.”
The fantasy night, as promised by Tess, is an underground cave sort of, in the basement of the hotel nicknamed “Sin City.” It is a room where lurid and lucid sexual activities exclusively take place away from the prying eyes of the general public. Phil and Julia walk into sin city and get drunk and join in a threesome with the strange woman with the yellow wig they run into in the hotel bar and the elevator earlier.
When they get back in town, Julia’s mother paid an unexpected visit with a prophetess she introduced as a half-sister. She had seen an omen about the couple, she came to tell, but Julia disdains her presence and dismisses her as a witch. It is not clear in the story what the prophecy was about, and for which I have beef with the writer. Don’t show a loaded gun in a drama without using it. The prediction may have significant input. Only that, according to Phil, the Prophetess utters some indecipherable words similar to the one they heard the man spoke. One, who struggled with the hunchback butler at the foyer of the hotel.
At the law firm, Phil accepts a critical and dangerous prosecution of a notorious crime boss, Ahmed Sinari, accused of murder. While his team-mates dreaded the case, Phil volunteers to take it at the behest of the firm. It had barely been a week after he takes the case when the serenity of their lives is broken by an ominous telephone call. The voice threatens to go public on him and his wife for the sin city threesome sex incident. Then follow pictures of the Madam, Phil, and Julia having it out in a room. Copies were sent to him and Julia, and the voice demands 400,000 Gh Cedis. The couple is befuddled: Who is doing this to them; how did the pictures got taken; who was in the room to witness the escapade? Phil goes back to the hotel, but no one could give account of the hostess or any of the staff. They had all vanished into thin air. Spooky!
In 4 Play Reloaded, we saw Chloe (Yvonne Nelson), with a Bible, on her knees, praying fervently for a man of her dream, and she got one. A doctor. But it seems she has gone away from the path of prayers and righteousness since she got the right husband. Here, in Sin City, the mother is urging to go back to the ways of worship and to the church. She leaves her with a Bible, to pray and fast for God to help her in her dilemma. Phil appeals to an old friend, Akeemy (Adjetey Annan), a retired army, and a private investigator for help with the blackmail issue. Akeemy’s effort could not take them anywhere. We only see him walk in the couple’s living room with a bruised cheek and shoulder, complaining, “I don’t know how you got into this; I don’t know how you going to get out.”
The blackmailer now asks for $200,000 after which, he will handover all pictures to Phil. Phil’s friend, Clem (Kweku Elliot) had double-crossed the law firm on the side of the criminal Phil was to prosecute. He presents five hundred thousand dollars to Phil so, he destroys the evidence and lets Ahmed Sinari go free. Structurally, Phil would not have accepted the loot. Have we not been introduced to Phil as a straight shooter? And Phil even one time refused to help Akeemy out with a case? With that character trait, we are sure disappointed to see him fall for a loot. Yet he has enough money now to pay the ransom, but he got wired for the presentation. We still need to see if Ahmed was taken in. After the hail of bullets in the empty warehouse, Tess and her Madam, including Clem, lay dead. All culprits were arrested.
Just as Phil and Julia are confused about the pictures from sin city, so is the reviewer’s befuddlement. I try so hard to make a logical, cause, and effect connection between Phil and Julia’s escapade to the criminal prosecution of Ahmed Sinari. It doesn’t. The escapade supersedes the criminal case, Phil volunteers at the firm. Therefore, there is no correlation here. Granted, all lawyers of the firm revere Ahmed Sinari, who has twice walked out of court on murder and drug charges doing the tango. A judge who once tried to prosecute him was found hanged on the roof of his house—apparent suicide. We are set up by that introduction to expect a significant fall out with the cartel or Ahmed Sinare. Don’t we? Nope! Sinare confesses to the murder and dispatches a briefcase full of loot to bribe Phil, just when he needs money to pay a ransom. I guess we are being taken for a ride here.
What the story makes me understand is Phil and Julia are caught in the crosshairs of a routine and planned gambit organized by gangsters to make money off of innocent philanderers. Phil and Julia had bought into the trick and let their feelings go wild. Yes, they did. The husband comments, “I never have seen you so…so…wild.” “Marriage can sometimes be so boring, and you need to find the sparks, sometimes, you know,” Julia concludes. If they committed such transgression, it is their responsibility to find a way out, and for which we can admire them. Presenting a briefcase full of dough to Phil to give it to his blackmailers is not a typical dramatic mechanic.
I suspect a binary plot scheme here in this story. Ones the story’s cause (premise) is established, we follow the thread to the point of effect. The prosecution of the murderer, Ahmed Sinari in Sin City, is a plot that was never watered, never cocultured with the theme, and never, therefore, bloomed. It withered. Same as the presence of Akeemy in the story. By his characteristics, I assume a hell-raising character, in the person of Rambo, yet his company is a thud. Besides, his part does not contribute to the story. The main plot is, Phil and his wife are caught in a blackmail gambit of organized crime, and how will they get out of it? The incident reminds me of Manny (Ramsey Nuoah) in The Accidental Spy movie. Just when as broke as a church rat and has decided to take a vacation, he wins a Jackpot lottery. It does not mean that it is impossible, but in drama, it is a fallacy. Could be this one too with the issue of a briefcase.