EfikoScore: 5/10.
Lisabi: the Uprising is the usual flawed stuff from the Yoruba Epic Movie assembly line.
Lisabi: The Uprising is the latest in a steady stream of Yoruba epics to come out of Nollywood. The faces are the same. The storyline is just about the same. Lateef Adedimeji (as the title character) picks up where he left off in Tope Adebayo’s Jagun Jagun. Once again, he is a lone warrior touched by spirituality who’s out to bring down the powers that be.
Here, the tone is confident, the ground, sturdier. The actors are surer of themselves now, perhaps from having done this movie a million times before. But like the films before it, Lisabi, too, is ruined by its storytelling.
For one, it is frontloaded with notions of who the characters are; it’s never content to let viewers decide. In the opening scene, for instance, a king (played by Femi Adebayo), is brought before the Alaafin for refusing to pay material tribute. He is treated roughly and sentenced to death in what is supposed to be evidence of the Alaafin’s heavy-handedness. But the sequence plays out more like evidence of the foolish rashness of the king than the cruelty of the Alaafin. Nobody speaks to a superior in that manner without consequences.
It is obvious that we are supposed to be able to identify the bad guy only because the film has decided who the villains are but is too impatient to show real villainy. This is weak screenwriting from Yinka Olaoye and Niyi Akinmolayan (who’s also the film’s director).
When we meet Lisabi, a character based on an actual folk hero of Egbaland, he exists in a bubble. The camera worships the ground he walks on, the soundtrack is adulating. There is such a disconnect between his world and the others’ that it can be argued he doesn’t live anywhere near the tyranny of the Alaafin and his tribute collectors.
The one link comes when he advises his carefree friend Oshokenu (Debo Adedayo) to be more hardworking to avoid the ire of the Alaafin’s men. But this advice is delivered so softly that it seems he doesn’t speak out of experience. In fact, these scenes seem like they take place in a different universe, except for the existence of Oshokenu, the story’s crossover character. It is through him that both universes come to feel like one.
But imagine a different scenario where Lisabi suffers the same humiliations as everyone else and then becomes a farmland innovator harvesting more produce to give the Alaafin’s tribute collectors. Imagine that his efforts fails to appease the collectors before they kill someone close to him. Imagine that the combination of humiliation and loss is what drives him finally to violence. Imagine, in other words, a better movie.
Instead, the screenplay introduces fantastical elements two-thirds of the way into a film where there was none before. This leads to the director and his effects team showing off some awful CGI. Even with the questionable VFX flourishes and some good-looking visuals, Lisabi is quite dull, offering a variation on scenes we have seen before.
Lisabi: The Uprising is the first of a two-part project executively produced by Adedimeji. Hopefully, the second part moves the entire project in a positive direction.
