NIGERIAN PRINCE: A Somewhat Standard Thriller Lifted By Its Novel Setting

The debut feature from Nigerian-American filmmaker Faraday Okoro, Nigerian Prince is the first film to be produced and distributed as a result of AT&T and Tribeca’s Untold Stories initiative, a grant program designed to ensure diverse filmmakers have opportunities to tell their stories on screen. During the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, Okoro pitched his idea to a panel of judges and won $1 million to make his film utilizing the Untold Stories program grant, mentorship and distribution commitments.

Following its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, Nigerian Prince is now making its way to theaters and video on demand services. The story of a Nigerian-American boy who gets caught up in the scams perpetrated by his wily cousin while on a trip to Lagos, the film uses standard thriller tropes to provide an eye-opening look at everyday life in Nigeria and the struggle to come to terms with one’s identity.

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Eze (Antonio J Bell) has been sent by his mother to her homeland of Nigeria against his will. He thinks he’s only supposed to spend four weeks over the summer in Lagos with his imperious Auntie Grace (Tina Mba); little does he know, his mom has planned for him to spend his final year of school in Nigeria as punishment for getting into trouble at his American school. But it’s also more than that: Eze identifies entirely as American, and his mother wants him to get more in touch with his Nigerian roots.

Eze is out of his depth almost instantly, getting easily conned out of a bribe at the airport until a kindly Australian businessman, Wallace (Craig Stott), helps him out. When he arrives at Grace’s house, he discovers that the power goes out every night, the television doesn’t work, there’s no Internet access and – possibly worst of all – he has to share a bed with Grace. Eze immediately calls his mother and demands to come home, so you can only imagine the shock to his system when he learns he is supposed to spend not just a month, but an entire year, in this country.

Grace warns Eze to stay away from her son Pius (Chinaza Uche), a proudly unscrupulous scammer who has sold cars to unsuspecting customers and then escaped with both the car and the money, and – of course – conducted numerous “Nigerian prince” email scams online. Eze offers to help Pius scam some people so that he can scrape together enough money to buy himself a ticket back to America. But, little does Eze know, Pius is already in trouble with everyone from crooked cops to federal agencies for his various schemes – and Eze is about to get pulled into that mess too.

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The basic storyline of Nigerian Prince – an impressionable young man gets involved in criminal schemes, with dangerous results – is nothing new. The crooked cop who threatens to kill Pius if he doesn’t get him the money he owes him feels too familiar to be truly threatening, and Pius’ attempts to gather the money are predictably ridiculous. What makes Nigerian Prince stand apart from the cavalcade of other crime thrillers cribbed straight out of the Guy Ritchie handbook is the Nigerian setting, which infuses every frame with a necessary freshness. Eze acts as the audience surrogate as he’s introduced to Nigerian food, cultural customs, Internet cafes, school uniforms, and more. The very landscape bubbles with color and energy, helping distract from the fact that much of the dialogue sounds awkward and stilted. In fact, Nigeria is the most fascinating character in the entire film.

The best human performer of the bunch is Uche, who brings a cheeky charisma to the character of Pius that prevents him from becoming too insufferable even as he digs himself into an ever deeper and more dangerous hole. It’s also absolutely hilarious to get a peek behind the curtain – or rather, the screen – at the reality of the email scams that are a staple of pop culture in the era of the Internet. You might laugh each time you get a weird spam email claiming to be from foreign royalty, but as Nigerian Prince shows us, the number of people who fall victim to these scams is greater than you would think. Those who do so are just as desperate as the perpetrators when it comes to the idea of obtaining easy money.

As Eze, Bell nails the stereotypical stubbornness of an American teenager so well that I honestly spent the entirety of the film wanting to punch him in the face. Kid, you’re in a new country, don’t you want to get out of the house and explore what it has to offer? Nope, he’d prefer to browse online shops on his laptop. The pretty neighbor girl is walking you to your new school, don’t you want to get to know her? Nope, he’d rather skip school, hang out with Pius, and plot his way back to America. He’s positively infuriating, though he does, fortunately, evolve over the course of the film. By the time Nigerian Prince reaches its tension-filled climax, Eze realizes that there are no easy ways out of an unpleasant situation – and anything that appears easy on the surface, such as scamming an unsuspecting stranger, is always going to have consequences.

Nigerian Prince: Conclusion

Nigerian Prince is a flawed first feature film, but it shows a great deal of promise. Kudos to the Untold Stories initiative for supporting up-and-coming diverse storytellers like Faraday Okoro, and to Okoro for putting his own unique stamp on an increasingly tired genre.

What you do think? Does Nigerian Prince sound a step above other thrillers about small-time scammers? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Nigerian Prince is released in theaters in the U.S. and on video on demand on October 19, 2018.