Once upon a time, an insane Christian book that claimed the devil created football as a tool to destroy humanity trended on the internet. I did the dirty work of actually reading and recapping it. The article was so popular that I decided to make my recaps into a weekly series named “So You Don’t Have To “, where I find batshit crazy pieces of media (books, movies, etc.) and recap them for your pleasure.
Today, I will be recapping the old Nollywood movie, The President Must Not Die.
The movie starts with the most incredibly early 2000s party I’ve ever seen. The party spot is dimly lit, and that can be seen are the outlines of bodies furiously grinding against each other along to jams by long-forgotten one-hit wonders.
All I can think about when watching this is how hot the space must be, and I’m proven right when a woman named Rachel, dressed in a tube top and bell-bottom jeans, emerges from the party looking exhausted and sweaty as hell.
Rachel is about to get in her car when she gets verbally harassed by two men. One of them says something about how offended he is that he tried to dance with her at the party but she turned him down. He starts to insult her when she counters his insult with a dirty slap.
The guys get angry and make to physically attack her but she beats the shit out of them using Nollywood style kung fu.
The men run away after getting their asses kicked. The movie cuts to a news broadcast discussing a longstanding beef between the president and vice president, which is insane but this is also Nigeria and weirder things have happened. The president is shown giving a speech at an event in the ugliest agbada I’ve ever seen.
When he’s done with this speech and tries to leave, a man wearing a giant jacket grabs the president. The president’s security is set to attack when the man in the giant jacket tells everyone to lower their weapons because he has a bomb strapped to his chest and will blow everyone to smithereens if they try shit. He opens his giant jacket and reveals what is supposed to be a bomb but really looks like eight sausages inserted into a utility belt.
Two hours after the president gets kidnapped, the kidnappers haven’t reached out with their demands. The vice president is shook and gathers the country’s top security heads in a conference room so he can yell at them.
The president’s wife storms into the office in a million braid wig and immediately starts screaming at the vice president to return her husband. You see, she believes the vice president has something to do with her husband’s abduction because of the beef he and her husband have.
The man in the giant jacket calls the president’s wife from a disconnected landline and says:
He gives her 24 hours to come up with the money before hanging up. The man in the giant jacket does his best to intimidate the president…
…but the president legit doesn’t give a damn…
…and asks to speak to his wife on the phone. Meanwhile, the president’s wife is losing her shit and calls a retired army general for help. The general is confused but she insists that her husband told her that if anything ever happened to him, she was to call the general. The man in the giant jacket calls again and the general attempts to track the location of the caller with a Windows 95 suite.
Tracking the origin of the phone call doesn’t work, and the general suddenly decides that rescuing the president is a job for his secret elite squad of perpetually angry female agents.
Discount Charlie’s Angels, if you will.
Kemi
Lisa
And Rachel (the kung fu lady from the movie’s opening scene).
The general gathers the three ladies to brief them on their mission when the man in the giant jacket calls again to inform the president’s wife of the drop-off point. All three actions ladies (this is what I’m calling them from now on) go with the president’s wife to the drop-off point, which causes an unintentionally hilarious shootout.
After like a minute of this, the kidnappers escape in their car but not before the action ladies manage to fire a tracking device onto their car. Take a look at what we’re shown when they fire the tracking device and tell me this wasn’t taken straight out of James Bond 007: From Russia with Love on PS2.
The man in the giant jacket and his accomplices get back to their base only to find out that the bag is full of blank papers. Fucking furious, he slams the president against a wall and raises the ransom money to $120 million as punishment for them attempting to fuck with him.
At that moment, a mysterious figure sashays into the hideout and is revealed to be one of the president’s top security chiefs. It turns out that this security chief hired the man in the giant jacket to orchestrate all this. However, the top security chief is mad because the man in the giant jacket is going against the original plans of just kidnapping and killing the president.
But the man in the giant jacket is like:
The president witnesses this interaction and realises that the man in the giant jacket was never going to let him live.
While all this is happening, the actions ladies find the kidnapper’s hideout and take out all the guards in cheesy ways, like this:
The action ladies storm the warehouse and a shootout ensues. Here’s an action sequence that takes place during the shootout:
Homegirl in the pink jumpsuit is lucky she didn’t get hit by a stray bullet while doing all that.
After a few more minutes of unintentionally hilarious kung fu hijinks (including a scene where one of the action ladies gets punched square in the right boob), it comes down to a fistfight between Rachel — the head action girl — and the man in the giant jacket. Rachel kicks his ass and kills him by impaling him on a rusty ass spike.
Just when you think the movie’s about to end, the man in the giant jacket somehow un-impales himself quietly, picks up two swords(?) and attempts to kill the president.
So the president and all the action ladies fill him up with bullets.
And all is well in Aso Rock.
Well, except for the top security agent who hired the man in the giant jacket to do all this. He realises that he’ll be going to prison for the rest of his life when it’s revealed that he was behind it. So he climbs into his car and shoots himself in the face.
Recommended: I Watched The Nollywood Movie, “Domitilla,” So You Don’t Have To
