Ojukokoro: Madness of Money

A petrol station, a payroll robbery, a kidnapping and nine bad decisions converge in one Lagos afternoon: the heist-comedy grammar of the Guy Ritchie school imported, dirtied and made unmistakably local - the desk's pick for the funniest structural trick Nollywood pulled in the 2010s

The premise is a joke told as a trap: Andrew, manager of a cash-heavy filling station with exactly the worst possible week, decides to rob his own employer - and the film then opens every other door in the building. A cocaine-adjacent accountant, two draughts-obsessed attendants, a gambler who cannot keep a secret about a payroll, a kidnapped wife, a political godfather's enforcer (Wale Ojo's Mad Dog Max, wearing menace like an ill-fitting suit) - all of them arriving at the same forecourt on the same afternoon with incompatible plans. Dare Olaitan's script runs the intersecting-timelines machine with more discipline than most films twice its budget manage: every coincidence is planted one scene before it detonates, and the Mexican-standoff payoff is earned rather than announced.

The craft is quick and clean where it needs to be: the forecourt is shot as a chessboard, the rewrites of time (the same moments replayed from a new angle) cut without a stitch showing, and the ensemble reads as genuinely performed rather than merely assembled - Emmanuel Ikubese's accountant gets the film's best physical-comedy rhythm, Ali Nuhu's grieving husband supplies the one thread that refuses to be funny, and the film is wise enough not to apologise for the tonal swerve. The money in the production shows up where it counts: night, rain, practical cars, one location held long enough to feel like a character. What shows up less kindly is the third act's appetite for explaining its own jokes to late arrivals.

The ledger's debits: a few beats of comedy are carried by mugging over writing, one subplot (the kidnapping's ransom arithmetic) outlives its usefulness by fifteen minutes, and the violence, when it lands, is treated with a breeziness the film's better scenes quietly argue against. And the time-juggling device demands attention in a market that rewards rest - the desk notes, fairly, that 'watch it on your phone after work' is exactly the viewing pattern the structure punishes.

Weight: Ojukokoro is the title the shelf points at in the decade argument - the proof that the new-wave generation could take a foreign grammar (the Ritchie ensemble-capade), set it on a Lagos petrol forecourt with local logic, and play it to full houses at home and international buyers abroad; it sits here beside Fifty as the 2010s' twin experiments in genre first, industry second. Judged as cinema: a confident comedy of errors with one act too many of explaining; judged as a moment: the moment the heist film became a Nollywood house style, and the reason three successors that followed owed more than they admitted.

The axes

Reviewed by The BRYME Entertainment desk on 2026-09-23. Scores follow the published method; they are never sold and never previewed to rights-holders. Disagree? The corrections door is open.

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