Playnetworks Studio present, Stan Nze (Ahanna Okolo), Bucci Franklin (Nze Okolo), Osas Ighodaro (Amara Okoli), Nobert Young (Ali Mohamood), Odera Ademora (Egbe), Brutus Richard (Smoke), Ayo Makum (Timi Phillips), Emeka Nwagbaraocha (Sango), Richard Williams (Ramsey Nouah), Efa Iwara (Bala) Omotola Jalade Ekeinde (Maimuna Atafo). Director, Ramsey Nouah; Writer, Nicole Asinago; Producer, Roxanne Adenkule Wright; Associate Producers, Wule Adesanya, Mpho Kuhene; Producer, Chris Odeh; Executive Producer, Charles Okpaleke; Director of Photography, Mohammad Atta. © 2020
Ramsey Nouah was testing the waters when he directed Living In Bondage: Breaking Free (2019). I sensed RattleSnake: The Ahanna Story would bear characteristics of the past films he acted in. RattleSnake…. is more of a rebranding of The Millions. Unlike The Millions, lots of blood spilled in Rattlesnake. This sophomore project is named Rattlesnake. Rattlesnakes are frequently associated with violence and revenge. We adduce from the title Ahanna Okolo (Stan Nze) as a dangerously wounded soul, not in a class of Alex (Ramsey Nouah), in A Private Storm (2010), on a path of vengeance on his mother and society at large.
Ramsey’s sophomore project characters keep on rambling and rambling until I almost fall asleep. But he has built this formidable character in Ahanna Okoli, who will keep any viewer awake. We want to see how damned he will be at the end of the story for a man who could look at his mother straight in the eye and shoot her dead on her breast, the breast he sucked as a baby. “I don’t know what to do with my life,” he laments at one point. “What else is good for the world is a brutal place to live,” goes his karma.
Imagine a seven-year-old kid witnessing a rogue gassed and torched by vigilantes. Later, he asks his father why the big shots aren’t gassed like ordinary folks when they steal? The experience leaves an indelible mark on the little fellow. The formation of his ‘karma’ that the world is a brutal place. His middle-class father dies mysteriously, and before long, his mother remarried his shady uncle and took his mother and siblings to Lagos. His world fell apart seeing him abandoned by his mother, he loses his bearing. No wonder it didn’t take much thought when he kills her in his first armed robbery. Ahanna had a ghostly apparition about his grandmother, who adjudicated between him and his dead parents. She tells him he didn’t kill his mother, but his uncle killed both his parents and therefore shouldn’t have any guilt.
Ahanna forms a criminal gang that is named the ‘Armadas’, consisting of Nze (Bucci Franklin), an addicted drug user in a nervous wreck; Amara Okoli (Osas Ighodaro), Nze ‘s only sister; Egbe (Odera Ademora), a disgruntled and forcefully retired military officer, and Bala (Efe Iwara), the man who gave Ahanna his first job in Lagos. And Sango (Emeka Nwagbaraocha), a childish IT protege. These are all hardcore criminals and expertise in their own rights. Ahanna recruited them to get money wherever possible because his grandmother had always said, “If you want something out of life, you take it.” They pull successful heists after heists, and they had the greatest of time with the windfall. Nze comments at one point, over the cliff, all the Armadas present (I love the shot), “You changed our lives.” The success and good times continue until they step on the tail of a tiger, a gubernatorial political candidate, Timi Phillips (Ayo Makum). Then the Armadas become a government concern.
The Armadas, except for Ahanna, are rounded up and sent to jail for five years. The notorious gangster in town, Ali Mahamoud, uses the Armadas as a bargaining chip to get Ahanna to pull him a bank heist. For the love of his crew, he agrees. His friends are released, though they show mixed feelings towards him, Ahanna, and the bank heist takes place successfully. Ahanna had planned the crowd to come to the bank and create commotion and diversion for all his men to safely getaway. Nze is gun-ho, and he is the first to get killed.
The handiwork of Ramsey is all over Rattlesnake: The Ahanna Story, ranging from Merry Men: The Real Yoruba Demons (2018), The Millions (2019), Merry Men 2 (2019). The bank heist in Rattlesnake…takes place in Surulere. I have never visited Lagos to step into the slums of Surulere. This neighborhood is consistently featured in most of Ramsey’s work. Correct me if I am wrong, I read somewhere, Ramsey grew up there, in Surulere. I have this visceral feeling, the artist is carrying his childhood nostalgia. The scene where the seven-year-old Ahanna witnessed the thief’s gassing is the reminiscence of a ghetto from Surulere. And it featured so too in Merry Men 2 as Garki village that Ayo (Ramsey Nouah) wants to develop.
Then too, the love relationship between Ahanna and Amara in Rattlesnake… is similar to the relationship between Ayo’s sister and Naz (Jim Iyke) in Merry Men 2. She has been kidnapped in the film just as Amara in Rattlesnake… In Merry Men 2, Ayo and his gang recruit Johnny (Uchemba Williams) as their IT expert. In Rattlesnake…, Ahanna recruits lollypop-sucking seventeen-year-old Sango to carry out the job at the art gallery. He was killed by Smoke (Brutus Richards) before the final run of credits of the film. Poor, young fellow. As Egbe could say so in Smoke’s face before the bank heist, “when this is all over, I will paint the streets with your blood,” he later strangles Ali Mahamoud’s lead henchman, Smoke, in the van. Nze’s excessive use of drugs gets him on the path of self-destruction.
One significance of Ahanna in the story is his characterization. He correctly plays the character of a rattlesnake, shrewd, sneaky, and laser focus in his heists (bites?). See how he masterminds the bank heist by engineering the distraction for their safe getaway. The formidable place he occupies and the notoriousness of his character, the way he looks at his adversaries with that cold downward stare, makes him unforgettable. If he did kill his mother in the movie, the only time he killed, we must forgive him as he rightly says, “out of impulse.” Inside of him, though, lays this soft tissue of humanness. There’s not a scene he didn’t shed a tear or two. At a certain point in the story, and as if expectant of the wages of his sin, he says, ironically, “I kept waiting for my sins to catch up with me. But nothing happens.” I guess the story bears the resemblance to Oresteia, in Greek mythology, who killed his adulterous mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus.
The screenplay has a tragic ending, as is the beginning when the seven-year-old Ahanna witnessed the thief’s gassing. Here two, his young son sees his mother shot and falls dead in Ahanna’s arms, and the little boy’s pov is Ahanna looking back at him. “There are key moments in one’s life that shape the core of who you are. Who you become. This would be my son’s first. His first memory,” Ahanna soliloquies. Besides other memorable shots and camera angles as in the skydiving, the sports car racing, and the crowd-control shot in the bank, the close-up shots and reaction shots in the scene of his son sitting in the car with his pov to the altercation and seeing his mother shot, are awful but beautiful. With fear, terror, and defeat in Ahanna’s face as he and his son locked in gazing at each other in the eye. The rapid successions of shots and cuts are remarkable, memorable directorial stunts Ramsey pulls here. In conjuring our senses and intellect to think like him, to see what he sees, is a rare ingenuity with most directors. Way to go Ramsey!