If the Nollywood faithful realized anything last year, it’s that people enjoy films set in Nigeria’s pre-colonial past. Specifically films set in Yorubaland, with a Yoruba dialogue track. Hence the rollicking success of epics like Anikulapo, Elesin Oba, and Agesinkole, the last copping about 320 million naira at the box office. Those films beam with similar grandeur: a larger-than-life hero, an extended running time, peacocky costumes, and elevated language. On the last point, a character might be bleeding to death but would still have the sangfroid to edify you with an apropos proverb. However, those films’ grandiosity isn’t always matched by a story with emotional and psychological heft. With Jagun Jagun, which premiered Thursday on Netflix, Femi Adebayo, Tope Adebayo, and Adebayo Tijani show second time’s the charm. The first is the producer and the last two are the co-directors of Agesinkole. They reprise that creative alliance in the new film. This time they match grandeur with intimacy and complexity.
Traversing eight Yoruba kingdoms in perhaps the 17th or 18th century, Jagun Jagun is patently about power, how it is misused and makes callously deranged those who wield it unchecked. It is also about masculine destruction and its bloody, far-reaching consequences. This man-made devilry not only affects men and women, it also poses great ecological threats—trees are senselessly felled to make weapons. According to one character who can communicate with green life, the trees prefer a more humanistic purpose.
Wielding military might and a mystical power, Ogundiji (Femi Adebayo) is the most feared person across the kingdoms. He and his band of warriors act as they will: deposing and installing kings, ravaging villages, and killing even their own for the flimsiest reasons. Ogundiji knows his Machiavelli, as he prefers to be feared rather than loved. If you are familiar with the epic genre, you know these excesses will cause his ruin. But who or what will deliver the fatal blow?
Played by a clean-shaven Lateef Adedimeji, Gbotija is the opposite of Ogundiji. Raised in a village of pacifist naturalists, he does not know the first thing about battlefare. But he knows everything about trees, including their silent language. They invariably heed him when he beseeches them; but the one time they speak to him, he either fails to decode the message or willfully ignores it. As he walks through a forest, headed for Ogundiji’s camp where he and a couple other young men hope to learn the art of warfare, a large tree falls and obstructs his path, a clear warning that he should not make the trip. He ignores the omen, joins Ogundiji’s school of warriors—a lookalike of the Agojie camp in The Woman King—and would generally be fine if only he had imbibed that famous nugget in Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power: never outshine your master.
Not only does he upstage Ogundiji, he wins his daughter’s affections, a double whammy on the older man’s ego which makes him bent on killing the upstart. But for all his tyranny, Ogundiji wants to be seen as reasonable and doesn’t order Gbotija’s execution outrightly. Instead, he opts for subterfuge: he puts the lad through a series of ghastly physical tests, convinced they will kill him. They don’t. Instead, they build up to a show-down between teacher and student. Certainly, the stakes here have a personal touch lacking in Agesinkole. In the first film, the stakes are communal. In this one, the stakes have a narrower scope as they revolve around one person, but that seems to make it more visceral.
Jagun Jagun wants to both shock and impress. It derives its shock value from its smart plot twists, but also by how it deploys language: sometimes it imports modern slang into its anachronistic set-up, like Cheerios in ancient Oyo. One such instance is when a warlord played by Odunlade Adekola tells another, “so pe o tilo,” a popular slang among Nigerian youths. Refusing to stay within its historical boundaries, this film shocks you with its modernity.
It also shocks the senses by how gratuitously it relays certain lurid details. Niyi Akinmolayan’s visual effects persistently draw the bead on the gory stuff. As that line from Kelly Cherry’s Rising Venus goes, “there is blood everywhere.”
As for grandeur, the film has truckloads of it, and it runs through the acting, dialogue and score. Adebayo plays Ogundiji with a head-twitching compulsion, a tic he parlays from playing Agesinkole. Those head spasms are, perhaps, meant to underscore the character’s blood-letting sociopathy. Also, loud, proverb-ridden monologues match boisterous scores which sometimes provide personality sketches. Using shock value and sweeping, even melodramatic spectacle, the film strives for memorability.
Setting it apart from Agesinkole are its characters who have more layered inner lives. In the other film, the hero’s motivations are revealed a little too late; so for most of the film he is more of an abstraction than a person. This film, however, presents a more human angle and on time, too: we learn about Gbotija’s backstory early enough, thus making it easy to be invested in his travails.
The film adequately captures the disastrous impacts of war. As the camera lingers on lifeless bodies, capturing the terror on faces stiff with rigor mortis, we see close-up how the actions of a few powerful men destroy the lives of ordinary people. What the camera doesn’t linger on, however, is Gbotija’s moral quandary. In fact, he does not seem truly conflicted by the immorality of annihilating an entire village. Though he condemns it, he never even considers the option of disobeying the dastardly order by leaving the training camp for good, especially as desertion does not seem to come with the threat of death. Yet he is supposed to be the film’s moral center. He doesn’t even recognize that he has become like the marauders who invaded his village and killed his father. In Jagun Jagun, action is rife and upbeat, but sometimes not enough attention is expended on the moral implications of said actions.
The way the film ends suggests a sequel might be in the works. Considering Agesinkole’s success, and given Jagun Jagun is a marked improvement on that epic, it’s likely this film will either enjoy that level of success or surpass it. As successful films tend to inspire copycats, one thing seems certain: Yoruba-style epics likely won’t be going out of style soon.