Kenneth Gyang’s long-awaited Oloture: The Journey picks up where the original left off. Oloture (Sharon Ooja) is trapped in a bus with other exploited women and their traffickers. Oloture: The Journey is one of Kenneth Gyang’s few EbonyLife detours into mainstream submissions. While Gyang has huge artistic credibility as a Nollywood filmmaker, this mini series ranks low among his submissions. 

Oloture: The Journey follows the titular character into the illegal migratory routes to Europe. Bureaucratic complications arise in the underworld following Oloture and Beauty’s (Adebukola Oladipupo) escape attempt and Beauty’s eventual successful escape. 

Tony (Daniel Etim Effiong) and Alero (Omoni Oboli) fall out, and Chuks (Ikechukwu Onunaku) squeezes through the cracks of their disagreement to become Tony’s new supplier. Meanwhile, a new power rises to challenge Tony in Ade (Bucci Franklin). Ade burns the bus transporting the women to Italy with Oloture and Peju (Beverly Osu) as the only survivors. They join Ben (Stan Nze) and Andrew (Amarachukwu Onoh) and continue the illegal journey to Europe. 

Meanwhile in Nigeria, Oloture’s superiors have cut ties with her. Meanwhile, Beauty finds her mother dead upon returning home and joins Chuks’ prostitution ring in Lagos with new plans to return to Europe “for her sister”. Meanwhile, Sir Phillips (Patrick Doyle) wants revenge on Alero after finding out Oloture is an investigative journalist. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile.

We spend the first episode (38 minutes) of this limited series in establishment hell. And it is rather curious because this is a sequel to a popular film whose world we are already familiar with. Half of the information is superfluous, and the other necessary half is dragged out avoidably. When we arrive in the second episode, some information fatigue is at play. Surely, this story could move faster. 

By the second episode, characters begin to make some truly bizarre decisions, as if the characters were growing in reverse. After seeing the horrors of the prostitution world, Beauty returns to it, and not with the motivation to dominate that world, but to continue to participate as an object of sexual violence. Her motivation is confusing at best, but she is a minor character. What argument can we possibly make for Oloture’s consistent naivety?

Throughout the mini series, we interchange between unearned goodwills—like randomly meeting two good-hearted men going your way on an illegal desert trail—and the expectations of miraculous boons by characters who should know better. The “brilliant” undercover journalist finds herself in an unkind city and goes off with a stranger who’s promised her an Al-Jazeera correspondent without informing her friends. It is as easy as tricking a bird into a cardboard trap with a trail of seeds. And after the clearly avoidable deed is done, we suffer the third problem of Oloture; a series of melodramatic tears. 

There has to be a cynic online who can compile every time a character cries in Oloture: The Journey à la Honest Trailers. At various points in the mini series, the overabundance of tears derailed it into melodrama. We get it, what is happening to you is terrible, but is there any other way to express your sadness without bawling? By the hour mark, the viewer resolves the mini series as a consistent flat tune of tears; Oloture: The Wailing. Beyond storytelling, there is a performance problem. 

Consider Matteo Garrone’s Academy Award-nominated Senegalese story on the same subject, Io Capitano (2023), and the difference in performance and narrative quality jump at you. Oloture’s performers chose the easiest, most accessible way to express their characters’ emotions. There is nothing outrightly bad about this, but when you have an entire cast of safe acting choices and a story that nudges them in that direction, you get a series like this.

In most cases, passable storytelling overshadows everything else. The cinematography comes alive occasionally, especially in the desert scenes, but nothing else draws the viewer back to this journey. As the story arrives at its denouement, the viewer wonders what exactly mattered about this journey that the 2019 original hadn’t covered. Thus, the viewer leaves the series as confused as the story itself. 

Oloture: The Journey premiered on Netflix on June 28.

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