Chika Lann Film Production present Ramsey Nouah (Bem), Blossom Chukwujekwu (Jerome), Ayo Makun (Wole Baba), Nancy Isimi (Ivy), Chika Lann (Amaka), Ali Nuhu (Sheik), Toyin Abraham (Adenike). Producer, Chika Lann; Cinematography, Toka Mcbaror/ Elijah Umanu; Written by Tunde Apalowo; Director, Toka McBaror. © 2019
If Nollywood named one of its productions, The Millions, just straightforward millions with an article attached for a motion picture title, who do you think would play the lead? You take the word right out my mouth, Ramsey Nouah. That’s the kind of film he likes to star in. The type where he can perform George Clooney stunts in style. Or the star before them. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in the bar in wartime Casablanca (1942), and we compare that scene to Bem and Ivey upon their first meet in the bar. Sometimes on cue, Ramsey can be silently heard, mimicking George Clooney’s acting voice. You may not listen to it, but I do.
Tell me a film Ramsey has not acted the big and the bad or the rich and famous. Of course, he can start small, but soon, he gets big. I can’t remember the film, Ramsey was broke as a church rat, and the next thing we saw, Ramsey won a lottery and ended up out of the country on vacation to New York. Yes, I’ve got it, Accidental Spy. He gets those kinds of roles. Do you remember when he addresses himself in the movie, Cornered and the memorable Nollywood lines?: “I am Cross, people call me Cross because, in my line of business, no one crosses me. Whoever does so will end up dead.” Here in The Millions, he says: “Jerome, my name is Bem Kator.” Now that name and the way he says it carries lots of weight.
Any woman with a dimple under her chin is spoilt. Ivey (Nancy Isimi) is spoilt. They know, you know they have that gorgeous beauty mark and flatter you with it. I learned about girls when I was young. They sell their faces to get ahead. I can fall for such dimples and a small straight Arab nose all day. Bem’s character is like Cross in Cornered. He has a weakness for delicate, luscious faces. A Summer print overhaul short on Ivey does him in. Her conversation with Bem seems suspiciously mechanical. Like one using a listening device that controls her every dialogue line from without. She’s a planted mole.
You’ve seen movies on double-crossing characters, trying to outsmart one another, with lots of death threats.
This takes the cake. There are about six successful scams that take place in the first fifteen minutes of this film. Bem (Ramsey Nouah) duped a man on a 419 counterfeit fraud; the man gives him a leather bag he thought was full of dough. Nothing but an old wallet. The scam goes on and on. A Nollywood Samuel Jackson type character, Wole Baba (Ayo Makun), brings Ben news of a robbery project involving 42 million dollars. A sharp contrast to the low life gambit he pulls, peddling drugs to neighborhood kids. A Nigerian billionaire has buried millions of dollars in cases in his basement.
Bem asks Wole Baba to join the operation but Baba says he doesn’t do field. Bem is already taking command of the operation. He doesn’t want to walk into a trap, and therefore wants Wole’s presence there. He doesn’t know however that Wole plants him Ivey as a mole to watch his every move. He knew so later.
He Bem, alone in his apartment, brooding over what Wole Baba has just now laid on him, Jerome (Blossom Chukwujekwu), another old con-artist friend, enters. He is quarreling and complaining about his wife and the pressure she bears on him for money. He cries to Bem he needs a job, any job as long as it pays. Jerome is like missing crime by going legit. He had had lots of money until his wife forces him to retire from the life of crime. His wife’s family suggests he worked for the family construction company. “Can’t do it.” That is how Bem, Wole, and Jerome get together. That’s how criminal gangs are found and formed and born. Bem is in. Jerome is in. Wole Baba has his men.
Let me take a time here and tell you the acting persona of Ramsey. He has never played a loser part. He always comes on top. He chooses his role well. Let me whisper this to you, I’m gossiping, Ramsey, I like stars like that. Don’t play a losing peddler and end up that way. Life isn’t steady; a character’s luck can change as well. Unless you want to rewrite Le Miserable. You are writing a thesis on the life of man as a winner. In The Millions, as well as in the Merrymen, all characters are in whites, at the open sea, in a boat popping their successes with an ice-cool champaign. Peace!
At first, Jerome thinks the idea of breaking into somebody’s basement and stealing a million was suicidal. Bem goes back to Sheik, gets some more money, some more threats, and works on the tunnel with Jerome and Wole Baba. Jerome is a Structural Engineer, the same way the crew had the savvy bespectacled IT in Merrymen. Jerome knows how to bore a hole that could reach the cache of millions of dollars across the street in somebody’s basement. With much labor and additional force, of about six, throwing in some tantrums and almost fistfights, they eventually found the money in the basement.
Just when they have transferred the loot to a safe hideout, they are first put at gunpoint by Wole, on behalf of his Boss, Ivey. Bem was not really surprised at the discovery. Ivey and Wole are in cahoot and put Bem and his cabal under gunpoint. But soon the whole gang was counter put at machine gunpoint by Sheik and his goons. Sheik and his goons run away with the van. The wrong van, though. Being a criminal of no small proportion and of the worst criminal repute, Bem had planned the exit out all along. Jerome’s wife Adenike (Toyin Abraham) drives the real get-away van to a safe-house. Bem and his original boys share the loot with Ivey. “I’ve always known that greed is a part of human existence.” He says to Ivey, as she is agape.
The overlapping plot twists, for instance, connecting Bem with Wole, Ivey as a connecting link, bring them all under one umbrella; it makes the story ends beautifully. The plot between Ivey and Bem is interesting. She had posed under a false name working with Sheik to get to the money first and was planted for Bem at the bar. Bem had got her profile as well. If you can’t beat them, join them. Ivey and Bem forged a relationship until they shared the loot and have a party in the open sea on a boat. They pull a successful heist. Told you he can pull it through. Bem did, Ramsey Nouah did.
A memorable scene in this movie is Jerome’s wife catching him at the notorious Bem’s dungeon. See how Bem and the big guy excused themselves from the scene. Bem: “I’ve got to take number 2.” Jerome’s wife Adenike (Toyin Abraham) meets her husband at Bem’s house. It is a comic scene for relief from this intense crime story. You should see how Adenike corners and scolds her husband, Jerome. Jerome senses what’s about to happen, and he takes a stride forward:
Adenike, “If you take another step…you will hear a gunshot… you think I’m joking with you? See, I don’t know what you are doing with Bem and these criminal-looking people. Look at them, they all look like thieves. What money have they got?”
Jerome, “Adenike, I’m doing this for us.”
“For us? Who is ‘us’?”
“There’s lots of money in this deal.”
“You people think I am stupid, eh? That your stupid friend going to do number 2.”
“Calm down for what?”
You will not quite enjoy this scene by reading it. Watch Adenike in this scene on film. She puts on unbelievable and comical facial contortions to hit home what’s angering her about Jerome’s hanging with Bem. In plain pidgin, and a squinting eyes, you can see her talking and wiggle her finger in Jerome’s face, and he stands there, Adenike, scolding him like a maid for wasting the cooking oil, on the tiled kitchen floor. Funny. It reminds me of Tyler Perry’s Madea. With her standing there in that shaggy bra and a bespectacled face, wiggling her fingers at somebody.