Tòkunbọ̀

The Ticking Clock and the Empty Promise of Escape

There’s a moment about twenty minutes into Tòkunbọ̀ when Gideon Okeke’s character, the ex-smuggler Tunde, stands in the middle of a Lagos highway, the weight of a three-hour deadline pressing down on him like the humid air before a storm. The camera lingers on his face—not in a close-up that screams for attention, but in a medium shot that lets the chaos of the city swallow him whole.

It’s the kind of moment that should feel electric, the kind that makes you lean forward in your seat. Instead, I found myself leaning back, arms crossed, waiting for the film to remember it’s supposed to be a thriller.

That’s the paradox of Tòkunbọ̀: it moves at a breakneck pace, but it never quite feels like it’s going anywhere. Directed by Ramsey Nouah, a filmmaker whose name has become synonymous with Nollywood’s push toward bigger budgets and slicker production values, the film is a curious blend of ambition and inertia. It wants to be The Transporter meets City of God, a high-stakes chase through the underbelly of Lagos with a dash of social commentary about class and corruption.

What it delivers, more often than not, is a series of missed connections—between its characters, its themes, and, most frustratingly, its audience.

Nouah has never been a director afraid of spectacle. His previous work, like Living in Bondage: Breaking Free and Rattlesnake, leaned heavily into the melodramatic, using heightened emotions and visual flair to mask the occasional thinness of the storytelling. Tòkunbọ̀ follows a similar playbook, but here, the spectacle feels like a distraction rather than a complement. The cinematography, widely praised by critics like those at Pulse Nigeria, is undeniably striking—shadows stretch across the screen like fingers, and the neon glow of Lagos at night gives the film a moody, almost dreamlike quality.

But for all its visual polish, the film struggles to find a rhythm that matches its aesthetic. Scenes lurch from one set piece to the next, as if the film is afraid to pause long enough for the audience to catch its breath—or, worse, to notice the gaps in its logic.

Take the central premise: Tunde, a former car smuggler, is blackmailed into delivering the kidnapped daughter of a Central Bank Governor to her captors within three hours. The setup is ripe for tension, a classic "time running out" trope that Archi Sengupta of LeisureByte described as an "effective hook" that the film "utilizes well." And for a while, it does.

The first act moves quickly, establishing Tunde’s world—a man caught between the scrappy survivalism of Lagos’s underclass and the opulent, corrupt world of the political elite. There’s a real sense of stakes here, a feeling that this isn’t just a chase, but a collision of two worlds that shouldn’t coexist. But as the film progresses, the cracks begin to show.