[blockquote align=”centre” author=”EfikoScore: 4.5/10″ style=”font-size: 30px”] Norman Maake’s film is based on an unoriginal concept that its committed acting talents can’t quite improve. [/blockquote]
In Inkabi, Michelle Tiren plays Lucy, a struggling Kenyan immigrant working at a casino in faraway South Africa. Over pressures from losing her daughter to the legal system, she succumbs to the overtures of a customer, waking up in his bed to watch him get murdered by a hit man, an Inkabi. Animated sequences get us up to speed with Inkabi history, which is linked to the ancient days of Zulu warrior supremacy.
The inkabi presented in the current timeline is named Scar (Dumisani Dlamini) and is not to be messed with. But a ray of hope exists in the form of Frank (Tshamano Sebe), an aging taxi driver Lucy once stiffed out of his fare. He, too, once was inkabi. Maybe he alone has the skills to get between Lucy and the hitman’s spear.
Scar walks with a giant unmistakable limp. Perhaps it’s an aesthetic choice meant to inspire awe—except it hardly comes across as formidable. His one successful hit in the film is a sneak attack, something added just for the plot. One wonders what threat Scar represents beyond the fact of his profession. Indeed, the safest location in the world is at the centre of the cross-hairs of Scar’s gun. He only fires minutes after his targets have left the scene.
We are invited to feel pity for Scar’s potential victim, Lucy. She has lost her child to an oppressive legal system. How dare they come between a mother and her child! But wait. We see mother dearest snorting up lines of coke on the job. Maybe it helps sharpen her eyes at the roulette wheel, but this mother won’t be winning her child back in the court of public opinion.
It does turn out that Frank could be the man for the job. He is convincing as a taxi driver and looks rather impressive behind the gun. He has just the right swagger, the posture, the stance. In another life and in a different clime, he may have been John Shaft. In the one covered by Inkabi, he brooks no complaint as he hops from one foot to the other. Sebe deserves commendation for his performance in the role. Alongside Tiren, he gives his job the seriousness it deserves. This pair of performers whip up frenzy and panic as the script demands, and they both settle into a calm, collected gravitas in sober moments.
But if only director Norman Maake and his crew had tossed all of that seriousness into the bushes and embrace the wild parodic elements that creep up now and again in his movie. Only then would his film be said to be original. What is presented instead is a movie with assassins, witnesses on the run, retired killers turned protectors, and an unbreakable code of conduct in an underworld with links up the higher strata of society? Does a premise get more John Wick/John Woo than that?
Inkabi is one of six micro-budget films commissioned and released as a collaboration between Netflix and South Africa’s National Film and Video Foundation. Because the collaboration is intended to create new opportunities for emerging filmmakers post COVID-19, the film gets a small nod of commendation. But as far as finished products go, one can only sigh.
