Efiko Score: 5.7/10
Obi Emelonye’s Black Mail would be an amazing film, if it didn’t demand too much suspension of disbelief.
It’s all rocks and no roses for action star Ray Chinda in Obi Emelonye’s suspense drama, Black Mail. Ray is going through marriage counseling with his estranged wife and working for the love and affection of his teenage children. He is also seeing his latest film through principal photography when he gets an email from a band of unscrupulous individuals. They have compromising videos of him. Unless he pays them off, his wife and the public will see those videos.
It’s been a long time since O. C. Ukeje won the Amstel Malta Box Office reality TV show and starred in his first feature, White Waters (2007). Here, as Ray Chinda, he brings his skills to play a man on fire against the incursions of a Russian Syndicate into his private world. He is joined by Alessandro Babalola, who stars as his Ray’s righthand man and manager, Ruben.
Rather than a thriller all out for fireworks and spectacle, Emelonye chooses to focus instead on the psychology and internal dynamics of his protagonist and others. Why do people succumb to blackmail? What goes into the making of a sleazy blackmailer? He doesn’t quite succeed but, if nothing else, his characters all appear human. Which is a trick neatly done here.
The villains, one is named Mighty Igor, are heavily accented like certain Hollywood villains. (For some reason, they are referred to as Ukrainians rather than Russians.) And the main man has a very primal reason for doing what he does. Same goes for his subordinates, Ivanna and Petra. Essentially, there are only suffering humans in this film, each driven just an inch further than his peers into perdition, by desperation. The desperation is understood for the villains. Not so for the protagonist.
Up until Ray makes a costly tech related mistake, his initial panic is not entirely understood. The film expects us to believe that being caught masturbating to porn is such a grievous error in today’s world. With a capable manager by his side, one can conceive of numerous ways to put a spin on the situation, so that at the start of the film, Ray’s panic is largely confusing. It’s even more confusing that Ray’s fears are directed towards his family and marriage to Nikki (Julia Holden).
While one understands that she is cross with him for past indiscretions, her levelheadedness and devotion to him suggests that Ray’s disturbance is manufactured. From the onset, it is obvious that a simple conversation might be all it takes to get her on his side. And Ukeje’s cool understatedness doesn’t allow him enough fussiness to propel the viewer’s frustrations.
That sense of being manufactured is Black Mail‘s true flaw. At every point in the film, a sensible course of action is pointed out, while Ray takes some other obviously stupid option. It is just so obvious that the film simply needs an otherwise sensible man to make mistakes.
This is unfortunate because the everything else plays out respectably. The actors are interesting to watch and several elements of the plot unfolds to a somewhat satisfying conclusion.
