Film June Wainana In Association with A Safari Media Film in Association with June Wainana Ltd. In Association with Sahara Media present Sarah Hassan (Lora) Raymond Ofula (Det. Generalli), Pierra Makena (Julie) Mwaura Bilal (Pinchez) Vicash Patni (Police Officer) Aseem Sharma (June Wainaina). Director, Danurf Brown; Cinematographer, Willie Owusu; Writers, Dancurf Brown © 2022
Just in Time (2021) bought me over and sold me to Sarah Hassan’s literary endeavors. A quaint little title and a quaint story got her on the good side of Netflix as well. Indeed, I was impressed; not so much by her succulent tomato color hue and extreme beauty, which made me permanently condemn her as “a behind the camera” person than in front. Her extreme beauty in the film was a distraction. Mawuli Gavor (Kobena) and Ashley (Stycie Waweru) carry the movie to a beautiful end.
Maybe Sarah Hassan’s literary gift comes from working with quaint and beautiful claims–– House of Lungula (2013), 40 Sticks (2020), and Just in Time. And now Villains in the Metropolis. What in a name? Villains in the Metropolis conjure up a New York-like Gotham City, on a cold Christmas Eve, when the streets are empty and spooked and any time now, Batman’s (1989) Joker, would appear and go on his way on a murder spree. My imagination and daydreams stop here.
I hardly recognized Sarah Hassan in her first scene in the foyer of her house, especially with gloved hands and a gun. A scene shot from the midriff down in a close-up. I see her face; not the one I first saw in Just in Time–beautiful, I ain’t lying. This other face is a little haggard, a little old, and has a fading hue–didn’t we hear she had a baby? Of course, that could be–postnatal effects. But she’s not to herself here; she’s disheveled. She has just killed a home invader, in the Kenyan metropolis.
Lora (Sarah Hassan) a medical doctor in her own right just killed an intruder who comes in bleeding from bullet wounds in his stomach. He’s looking for a hideout shelter. But this intruder awakens in Lora, the hideous experience when a group of armed robbers burst into their living room. Lora was a five-year-old girl and saw her dad shot at point blank in their living room, in front of her mother. The old hatred of criminals and the thought of revenge that had laid dormant in the deeper recess of her head returned. She shot the intruder with his gun.
Of the two Sarah Hassan’s projects, 40 Sticks and Villains…, I will gladly put my money on 40 Sticks. It is as spookier and grittier as a film could get. Imagine a van full of prisoners, each with a history of the heinous crimes they committed, and all bound for a prison colony way in the deep of the forest, and unbeknownst to them, a mysterious, ghost-like killer gets in their midst. It is like the criminals face purgation right here on Earth, as the ghost-like killer hacked them all categorically.
You see, the 40 Sticks premise is clear and simple. Not so with Villains in the Metropolis where characters were manufactured as we go. A medical doctor kills a home invader when she overhears his confession to an earlier crime and that triggers Lora’s psychic to avenge her father on this intruder. And until she slaughters Julie, Lora only has two murders on her hands but Alex did the cops, in defense of Lora. He shoots the Detective who enters Lora’s apartment and wants to arrest her for murder. Then when another Detective shows up in the abandoned warehouse, Alex shoots him too. The shootings in Villains in the Metropolis seem synchronized, like a programmed documentary.
Another shortcoming of Villains in the Metropolis is the use of a voice-over. Voice-overs could be commentaries on a project, and lead viewers in the direction the writers or directors want them to follow the story. Beautiful narrative technique, but it could be used sparingly so, as not to stand in the way of the actor’s dialogue on the screen. Voice-over in this movie seems more like an Ode to the human character in the Metropolis, with no poetic rhythm. The voice flirters with philosophic theories.
As incoherent as the voice-overs, so is the inconsistency of the scenes and story progression. At a certain point in the story, there’s a sense of cheesiness: In the scene when the voice-over says, “Each one of us has a unique story to tell…. Do you know why bad things happen to good people? I will tell you.” Lora responds on film, “Because it makes a fucking awesome story.” Naturally, Lora does not have to respond to that voice-over, like talking to a grandfather in the next room. That is for the viewers and the response is cheesy! Matter of fact in film language we call that, “Breaking the fourth wall.”
Lora ultimately lost it after shooting the home invader, that’s not a motivation enough to become who she is in the film––Villain. She and Alex have already become partners in crime when he shoots the Detective on her behalf. But went with her mess-up life through the deep curve when she turned on Alex too for cheating on her with Julie. She has never taken action until now, maybe, finding out she’s pregnant with Alex. Upon texting Julie on Alex’s phone, after she makes Alex go into delirium, Lora finds where Alex’s heart is, and she kills Julie. The scene and its follow-up are a little soapy here.
Lora must have all the attributes of a villain even as the story didn’t give us the good guy in the entire ninety minutes of her tying Alex and Julie, which we did not see her doing, she had had a traumatic experience when her father was shot, her mother shot, and she molested. What motivated her more was jealousy of Julie trying to steal away the future father of her unborn child. She knows and takes it with an oblivious demeanor that what punishment she inflicted on Alex and Julie was wrong, yet to her, it is simply an act of revenge and power over the victims. A characteristic I can assign to Lora in this movie is a “villain.,” and not in the plural. She’s the only villain with a fine face. Her beauty, wickedness of mind, selfishness, and willpower attest to that definition.
Of all the characters in Villains in the Metropolis, I found out that Det. Generali (Raymond Ofoli) was hovering over an investigation that didn’t make it clear on screen. We see him whining, groveling, and wanting his secretaries to call this and that person, and in the end, I ask myself, what is his beef in the story? Lora didn’t stand out here as Alex Forrest (Glen Close) in Fatal Attraction (1987). Alex in Fatal Attraction has stature for the kind of stunt she pulled in the movie and not Lora, a characteristic of a villain she didn’t have, especially when we have a bad girl but not a good girl, who would have Julie killed Lora in a bloody fight. Villains in the Metropolis rather than the beautiful title, didn’t bite on anything if you asked me.