Gangues de Lagos

I came to this with pretty low expectations: while I enjoy some 'classic' West-African cinema, Nollywood tend to horrify me, often taking the worse of Western cinema and leaving the out the good bits.

It is far from perfect: a lot of the secondary and some of the primary characters are acted by amateurs. The fight scenes, while sometimes well choregraphed, are evidently mimed (the lack of sync between the moves and sound effects being partly to blame). The camera work is unobtrusive and we are served some inevitable clichés (i.e. Pink-and-blue-lighting in the club scenes), and the soundtrack is a bit homogenous for my taste But the scenario actually holds its own pretty well, offering a gritty and credible slice of Nigerian street-life and a classic 'rise of the foot-soldier' narrative. Most of the characters are morally ambiguous and while it remains fairly predictable, we are far from the simplistic Manicheism of Nollywood. While the dialogues could have been better, all of the main characters are credible, and the writing for the most part successfully walk the fine line between the grotesque and the spectacular, which most crime-stories have to tread.