Moses Inwang’s latest film, Blood Vessel (not to be confused with the 2019 Australian horror of the same name) is part social melodrama, part Captain Phillips, and part Die Hard on a cargo ship. It’s an interesting departure for a Nollywood director best known for comedic social commentary films, and not for a well-shot, Netflix-budgeted action thriller.
It follows Abbey (David Ezekiel) and Oyin (Adaobi Dibor), a star-crossed pair of lovers whose tryst and pregnancy has invoked murderous rage from Oyin’s father. Together they join four other disparate Nigerians who, each for their own reasons, must escape their home in Nembe, lest the authorities catch and likely kill them. When a pair of idealistic brothers, Tekena (Sylvester Eka Nem) and Olotu (Obinna Christian Okenwa), mention they have booked secret passage as stowaways on an oil tanker, the rest quickly agree to follow suit, and take refuge in a tiny unused ballast chamber, deep within the hull.
Locked in, the lack of food, petty grievances, and their inner guilt about their own pasts threaten their situation. To make matters worse, Igor (Alex Cyr Budin), a psychotic Russian crime boss who owns the ship, is using it as a party yacht. When his men realise they have stowaways on board, things take a vicious turn and the refugees become toys for the Russians’ sadistic entertainment.
It’s a recipe for an interesting movie, from a variety of angles. The film is shot largely on a real oil tanker, and it gives much of the film a unique feel. It’s not quite up there with the sort of alien mechanical strangeness that made Dead Slow Ahead such a beautifully uncanny experience, or the inventive war-pornography of a US military propaganda piece like Under Siege, but it gives the visuals a definite boost, and Gideon Chidi Chukwu’s cinematography is certainly one of the film’s best aspects.
The plot, on the other hand, suffers from not quite knowing what it wants to be. The first hour feels almost like a barebones social drama, setting up the ire of the Nemba people against the oil companies, the constrictive local laws and superstitions, and the might and corruption of the local military law enforcement. But it’s all told very thinly, and leans far too heavily into flat didactic soap-opera, where subtlety and character work would have served better.
The latter half of the film, where it turns into an action thriller doesn’t quite work. Budin is having a whale of a time as a cartoonish villain, but he’s so out of step with the more sombre tone of the rest of the movie that it makes his scenes feel awkward. Also, the film wrong-foots itself by repeatedly showing various similar scenes of him paying off local officials at ports with a suave grin, then almost immediately cutting back to him running around the ship in a vest, waving a knife around like a madman. Adding to this, his climactic knife battle with Abbey is so poorly choreographed and edited that it invokes guffaws rather than gasps.
It also doesn’t help that several of the actors simply aren’t on par with their colleagues in terms of performance, making some serious moments come off as laughable, or worse, deathly dull. This isn’t the case for Ezekiel and Dibor, whose romantic through line carries much of the movie. Yet, instead of cementing the audience’s investment in their story, their backstory is mostly told in flashback almost at the film’s close. A strange decision, and one that only hampers the narrative, as it contains some major motivating information that would have explained much of the action in the first half.
It could well be that this film has been heavily reworked at the script stage, or reedited in post to better suit a ‘Netflix audience’. There are various costume changes, odd references to things not yet happened, and other moments that point to either errors made during filming, or a great juggling of scenes after the fact.
In any event, the final result is a film that is watchable, although not particularly entertaining. The social commentary feels sophomoric and obvious, the action is high-school play levels of rough and tumble. For such a great premise and a varied location, it’s a squandering of riches; certainly one that is hard to recommend for anyone who isn’t either a connoisseur of African cinema, or a diehard fan of action films.
Screening on Netflix now