KING OF BOYS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (HOW TO FAIL AT MAKING A SEQUEL)

 (In this article, I will be referring to King of boys and King of Boys: The Return of The King as KOB and KOB2.)

WARNING!!! Mild Spoilers ahead. In case you haven't watched any of the movies. I'll suggest you go see them first and come back to read.

King Of Boys is one of the most talked-about Nollywood movie releases of 2018. Its huge success at the box office is one no Nollywood movie has been able to achieve in recent times. Racking in a whopping 245 million naira at the box office. Today, KOB is one of the highest-grossing Nollywood movies of all time. If you're a Nigerian and you haven't heard about this movie or seen it. I'm not exactly sure where you have been. Following up on this huge success are several award nominations. It won awards at the African Movie Academy Awards for Best Actress in a Leading Role - Sola Sobowale, Best Actress in a Supporting Role - Adesua Etomi-Wellington. It also received several nominations at the African Magic Choice Awards. The cast list of King of Boys was packed with familiar faces and veteran actors and actresses, all of them delivering strong performances in their various roles. With all these King of Boys needs no further introduction.

Going into this sequel, it's clear that KOB2 has big shoes to fill, with the staggering achievements of the first movie. The plot of KOB2 takes place some years after the events of KOB. We get to see the return of Eniola Salami from exile and she is even more ambitious than the last time we saw her. Eniola doesn't just want her throne back as the King of Boys (a group of cabals that controls the underworld of Lagos). Eniola wants to contest for the next governor of Lagos state. We get to sink in seven hours of runtime to see how all these build up unfolds. We see the return of some cast from KOB and the introduction of new ones that fit in nicely into the story this sequel has to tell. There was also strong effort in delivering good cinematography and the costuming was also great. The political power play and the tussle between characters was also present. It stayed true to what it established itself as. You can't take away all these from both KOB and KOB2.

However, after spending my time watching KOB2; I didn't binge it by the way. I took my time to watch it. There is just this feeling I couldn't shrug off getting to the end of this sequel. Without a doubt in those seven hours of runtime, there was the feeling of experiencing a sequel in there, but there were some questionable elements and a sense of unfulfilled expectations from a sequel of a huge hit movie.

Now you might be also wondering why this headline to the sequel of a movie with such huge success? Almost everybody on social media is praising KOB2. You can barely find divided opinions, but I can assure you if you look deeper, you'll see it. If you're a type of movie watcher that doesn't like to look at things objectively. You will miss a lot of things that are right in front of your eyes. There is only one thing social media does best and that's the selling of hype and herd mentality if you’re expecting to hop on a train going this route with this article. Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, this is not where this train is headed.

MAKE A THING THAT DOESN'T NEED TO HAPPEN A THING

The first thing I was concerned about when I heard there is going to be a sequel for King of Boys was the fact that the first movie ended on a conclusive note; at least in my opinion. But then it was revealed not to be a movie but a seven-part series on Netflix. That's where I started questioning this big move but I’m an open-minded person. As an open-minded person and I like to give the benefit of the doubt when it comes to contemporary Nollywood movies and I can say I'm even lenient when I review their movies because there is a huge gap between Hollywood and Nollywood when it comes to their years of filmmaking. Using the same scale to judge will be very harsh and unbalanced. So, I totally watched KOB2 with an open mind. After sitting through the seven hours of its runtime the question of why make it series still lingered in my mind and let me take you through what I arrived at.

In an interview with FilmCourage on YouTube. Chris Gore expressed a statement that really resonated with me as a movie watcher and reviewer and I think I should share it with you guys. The subject was 'Why 99 percent of movies today are garbage', this interview is in two parts. In this interview, he brings up the fact that part one of a movie are borne out of genuine artistic creativity and the want to do something very original but sequels on the other hand are made for money. This is usually a result of film executives and movie companies trying to milk out a successful release of a movie. Personally, I don't think KOB2 was made for money. This digression is to give you guys a little context to my next point.

In the case of KOB, the writer, the director and the producer are none other than, Kemi Adetiba herself. She basically has the say from the beginning to the end of anything that has to do with this movie. So, it's not like there is a group of money-hungry executives somewhere pressuring for a push for a sequel to cash out. Then, I dug a little deeper and made some research. Luckily for me, I found an interview on BellaNaija's youtube channel, 'Kemi Adetiba & Toni Tones on the Making of King of Boys: The Return of the King'. In her interview with BellaNaija, the interviewer asks Kemi how she feels about the return of the king and why she decides to make it a seven-part series. After answering the first part of the question, she went on to say and I quote: 

'... I wasn't going to do a second part. I wasn't going to do a follow up to KOB1. I think everybody thought that because of the way it ended. I just want it to end that way. So, I wasn't interested and then not even the fact that it had huge following was going to bring it back because I was not motivated by money and I think for me, one of the big things for me, I don't want to hoodwink people. I don't want people to go Okay, KOB, it'll be good and there's nothing there. So, I'm not that kind of filmmaker...'

At this point in the interview, my doubts were clear about some things. I might be wrong about this but I think KOB2 was made for Kemi to further register herself on Netflix lines of movies. KOB2 being a tv series felt like the need to make a Netflix tv series than a proper sequel. It won't be a surprise if there is going to be a season two. What I would have actually love to have become of KOB is for it to be an amazing trilogy to tell whatever story that is left to tell. This is the usual trend movies take and it is always well received.

Let me elaborate on this a bit. In the movie industry, when you say you make a follow-up sequel to a movie. It is usually from a movie franchise being expanded into a tv series or tv series being giving a concluding wrap up with a movie release. Note that I said the word franchise, this is because it’s after a number of movies are released and concluded. It can be expanded upon by being adapted further into a tv series. In most cases, you have new characters introduced and you barely have any original characters reprising their roles. Although, during the course of events they might be referenced and that is all there is to it. A prime example of tv series given a sequel in form of a movie is one of the greatest tv series of all time, Breaking Bad. Years after its final episode was aired. A sequel movie El-Carmino was released. The purpose of this movie is to answer some questions that were left unanswered and it put a satisfying end to Jesse Pinkman’s story which was left open-ended in the final episode of the series.  

LET YOUR CAST’S PERFORMANCES COMPENSATE FOR WHERE YOUR SCRIPT IS LACKING

If you ask any average Nigerian that has watched KOB2. The first thing they will bellow out is how fantastic the acting was. They'll tell you how they enjoyed watching Shola Sobowale carry this film with the character of Eniola Salami. They'll tell you how all the actors did well in their roles. They'll go on and on about the things they enjoyed about the movie like the costumes of the characters but in the end, they'll put the plot of this series third or second in their praise list. Now don't get me wrong there is nothing wrong with having a great cast delivering outstanding performance. Once again, for this entry, I enjoyed the performance of the actors and actresses, even the new ones introduced. Where the issue of a weak plot comes into play is how there were so many missing events in the timelines in the plot and some scenes drag on too long for no reason. Missing events in the sense that they were only mentioned in the dialogues of the characters and this didn’t do justice to the weight they carried.

Now, I fully understand that it's a technique that can be used to shorten a movie's runtime and sometimes compensate for a lack of adequate budget in other cases. In KOB2 you have the instances of Eniola Salami having influence in the country's political affairs while she is in exile, thereby facilitating her pardon and return to the country. For the main character to pull huge strings like this, it's something that needed to be seen and not just said in dialogues. You can also link this to the cabals in this series. As intimidating as they said they were, we never get to see this in full form throughout the runtime. There was just only one scene where a man was tortured by Odudubariba and that was all. The rest was just by dialogues. Now you might say we saw some of their activity in KOB1 but then Eniola was on the throne then. In KOB2 we had Odudubariba on the throne throughout the movie and it was a different type of reign.

Some missing events I noticed while watching was a big reveal that falls flat during Dapo's (The journalist) story arch. This occurred where the rift between his wife and himself was revealed. It was not just because of his obsession with his work but also because they lost one of their children in an accident Dapo was involved in and his wife blames him for it. Dapo claims to carry this pain but we never get to see it shown. Again, it's a missing core event in Dapo's story. Not at any point in this series did we get to Dapo's emotional side linking to this big reveal. Now you might say all these are a result of time runtime constraints. Well, I would say this movie turned into a series that had seven hours to get some little details right and it didn't.

We get to see the return of Makanaki, a character that was clearly killed off in the first movie. How did he survive? Well, he happens to have some supernatural charm protection. It's at this point this movie took a 180-degree turn. This idea was never established in the first movie and pulling such a twist was just odd. How did we get to this point of the supernatural being an element? This is a question I could barely find an answer to. Furthermore, we don’t get to see how Eniola and Makanaki reunite until the final episode. This was just packaged as another twist in the final episode. How Dapo was betrayed by his boss came out of nowhere and an explanation was just thrown to the audience after the damage was done to the character. Not to sound like a broken record, there were just too many moving parts in the final episode and everything felt rushed. This ultimately puts some scenes into the problem of finding it hard to cohere with one another.  

On a final note, I don’t think I’ve written an article on my blog this long before. I would have loved to critique more things about this movie but I think I’ve ranted enough at his point. In the end, KOB2 is out there while it has its high and low points. There is a thing or two that needs to be learned which, I hope filmmakers can take note of.