Today, we are diving deep into the complete review of King of Boys (2018) and King of Boys: The Return of the King (2021) — Kemi Adetiba's landmark Nollywood political crime franchise starring Sola Sobowale. Is it worth watching? Our honest, in-depth take.
Introduction: Before and After King of Boys
There is a clean line in the history of modern Nollywood. A before and an after.
Before King of Boys, the conversation about Nigerian cinema — even among people who loved it — was always hedged with qualifications. "It's good for Nollywood." "It's not quite Hollywood, but…" "You have to adjust your expectations." The asterisks came automatically, an apology baked into the praise.
After King of Boys, those asterisks got smaller. Not gone entirely. But smaller.
When Kemi Adetiba's political crime epic dropped in Nigerian cinemas in October 2018, it arrived with significant pre-release noise — the director of The Wedding Party was making something completely different, a nearly three-hour gangster film with a middle-aged woman at its violent, commanding center. Expectations were mixed. Curiosity was enormous.
What audiences got was a film that was flawed, ambitious, sometimes excessive, occasionally clumsy, and utterly unlike anything Nollywood had produced before it. A film that went on to become one of the highest-grossing Nigerian movies of 2018, earning an impressive ₦245 million at the box office. A film that eventually found a global audience on Netflix and was referenced — referenced — in the UK Parliament during a foreign affairs committee meeting in 2021. A film that launched a sequel Netflix series that made Sola Sobowale a household name internationally.
King of Boys is not a perfect film. Anyone who tells you it is has not watched it carefully enough. But it is a genuinely important one. And it is great in ways that matter.
This is the complete review — the original film, the Netflix sequel, where both succeed, where both stumble, and why the franchise, taken as a whole, represents one of the clearest expressions of what Nollywood is capable of when it swings for the fences.
King of Boys (2018): Quick Facts
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Title | King of Boys |
| Director / Writer | Kemi Adetiba |
| Producer | Kene Okwuosa, Kemi Adetiba |
| Production Company | Kemi Adetiba Visuals (KAV) |
| Release Date | October 26, 2018 (Cinemas) |
| Streaming | Netflix, Amazon Prime Video |
| Runtime | 2 hours 49 minutes |
| Genre | Political Crime Thriller / Drama |
| IMDb Rating | 6.4/10 |
| Box Office | ₦245 million (Nigeria) |
| Language | English, Yoruba, Pidgin |
Cast: Sola Sobowale (Eniola Salami), Adesua Etomi-Wellington (Kemi Salami), Reminisce (Makanaki), IllBliss (Odogwu Malay), Toni Tones (Young Eniola), Paul Sambo (Inspector Gobir), Akin Lewis (Aare Akinwande), Jide Kosoko (Alhaji Salami), Sharon Ooja (Amaka), Osas Ighodaro (Sade Bello), Sani Mu'azu (Inspector Shehu), and others.
King of Boys: The Return of the King (2021): Quick Facts
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Title | King of Boys: The Return of the King |
| Director / Writer | Kemi Adetiba |
| Format | 7-Episode Netflix Limited Series |
| Release Date | August 27, 2021 |
| Streaming | Netflix (Worldwide) |
| Genre | Political Crime Thriller / Drama |
| Language | English, Yoruba, Pidgin |
New Cast Members: Nse Ikpe-Etim (Jumoke Randle), Richard Mofe-Damijo (RMD), Efa Iwara (Dapo), Charles "Charly Boy" Oputa, Deyemi Okanlawon, Keppy Ekpenyong Bassey, Bimbo Manuel, Taiwo Ajai-Lycett.
Returning Cast: Sola Sobowale, Toni Tones, Reminisce, IllBliss, Paul Sambo, Titi Kuti (Ade Tiger), Akin Lewis, Osas Ighodaro.
What Is King of Boys About? (Plot Summary — Original Film)
King of Boys centres on Alhaja Eniola Salami — a woman who contains multitudes and contradictions in almost every scene she appears in. By day, she is a philanthropist, a businesswoman, a pillar of her community. She hands out materials to market women. She attends church. She hosts parties where governors show up. She speaks with warmth and authority and charm.
And then she steps into a different room, and she is the eponymous King of Boys — the most powerful criminal figure in Lagos, sitting at the head of a table of gang lords who all owe her a percentage of every deal they make. She is not their boss in any metaphorical sense. She is their boss in the most literal and non-negotiable way. Whatever they do, she gets her cut.
Now she wants more. Eniola has political ambitions. She wants to cross from the underworld into mainstream politics — to become a minister, to hold legitimate power, to be the person whose name is on buildings rather than whispered in fear. But the men who have tolerated her in the underworld are not prepared to let her walk into the daylight. And the politicians who have benefited from her criminal connections are not about to let a woman who knows their secrets get anywhere near real institutional power.
The power struggle that follows involves betrayal at every level — gang lords who refuse to pay her cut, political allies who turn against her, trusted lieutenants who test her authority, and a principled detective named Gobir (Paul Sambo) who refuses to be bought. And underneath all of it, in a series of flashbacks that give the film its non-linear structure, the story of how a young girl named Bunmi became Alhaja Eniola Salami — how power is acquired, what it costs, and what it does to the person who holds it.
The film climaxes with a betrayal so devastating it changes everything, and ends not with resolution but with devastation and the promise of something even more dangerous to come.
Sola Sobowale as Eniola Salami: A Performance for the Ages
Let's be direct about this: Sola Sobowale's performance as Eniola Salami is the reason King of Boys works. Not the only reason. But the primary one.
Sobowale is a veteran of Nigerian entertainment — Yoruba movies, television, stage — with a reputation built over decades for the kind of loud, forceful, larger-than-life performances that audiences love and critics sometimes qualify. King of Boys gives her something different to do. It asks her to be enormous and interior simultaneously. To be the room's most powerful presence while also being, in her private moments, someone eaten alive by what that power has cost.
She does both with astonishing completeness.
The scene that introduces Eniola to the audience is a masterclass in character establishment through contrast. In the space of a few minutes, Sobowale takes Eniola from warmth to cold-blooded murder to domestic charm, all without losing the thread of who this woman is. You understand immediately that Eniola is not a villain who has found a cover. She is a whole person — loving mother, generous patron, ruthless killer — and the horror and fascination of the film is that these things coexist in her without apology or contradiction.
Her command of every scene she is in is total. When Eniola walks into a room, the camera and the other actors and the audience all follow. Sobowale does not perform power — she radiates it. And her Eniola does this while also being unmistakably, particularly Nigerian. The specific way she yells, the particular cadences of her Yoruba-inflected English, the way she calibrates her warmth and her threat depending on who she is speaking to — these are not generic mob boss qualities. They are Eniola's, rooted in a cultural specificity that makes the character feel completely real.
When she is finally brought down in the film's devastating final act — not by her enemies but by the love she was unable to fully protect — the grief in Sobowale's face is genuinely devastating. You have spent nearly three hours with this woman. You know what she is. And you feel her loss anyway. That is the sign of an extraordinary performance: one that makes you feel things you know you perhaps should not feel.
Multiple critics and viewers have called it one of the finest individual performances in Nigerian film history. It is very hard to argue with that.
Toni Tones as Young Eniola: Brilliant Casting, Brilliant Performance
One of King of Boys' most quietly brilliant decisions is the casting of Toni Tones as the younger version of Eniola in the film's flashback sequences.
The similarities between Tones and Sobowale — physical, gestural, tonal — are close enough to be convincing without being so exact as to feel like imitation. Tones finds the Eniola who is not yet hardened, the girl who is still capable of being hurt by the world before she decides to be the one doing the hurting. Her sequences carry an emotional weight that enriches the film's present-day timeline considerably. Every scene with young Eniola recontextualises something about the woman we see in the film's main action. That layering is one of the script's genuine structural achievements.
Reminisce and IllBliss: When Rappers Act
One of King of Boys' most discussed gambles was casting two of Nigeria's most respected hip-hop artists — Reminisce as Makanaki and IllBliss as Odogwu Malay — in major dramatic roles. Both were making their acting debuts.
The results are genuinely interesting. Neither man is a trained actor, and there are moments where that shows. But both bring something to their roles that trained actors might not have: a specific Nigerian street credibility, a physical and linguistic authenticity in the world of Lagos crime that feels impossible to fake because, in terms of cultural proximity, it isn't faked. Reminisce's Makanaki in particular — cool, calculating, with a sense of barely contained violence — is one of the film's most compelling supporting figures. His loyalty to Eniola, and his eventual challenge to her authority, drives a significant portion of the narrative's tension.
The decision to cast rappers who had spent careers embodying a version of Nigerian street power was not a marketing stunt. It was a directorial insight.
Kemi Adetiba's Direction: Ambitious, Flawed, Unmistakable
Kemi Adetiba is not a subtle director. King of Boys makes this clear from its very first scenes and never stops making it clear. Her backgrounds in music video direction show constantly — in the stylised lighting, the colour-coded visual grammar, the preference for moments of heightened visual drama. The chaos scenes are garish and electric. The affluent scenes are warm and manicured. It is a deliberate visual language, and sometimes it works beautifully and sometimes it works against the film's grander ambitions.
The non-linear structure — cutting between Eniola's present power struggle and the flashbacks showing how she came to be who she is — is the film's most Coppola-esque quality, and it draws comparisons to The Godfather Part II that are both complimentary and diagnostic. Complimentary because the ambition is real. Diagnostic because Adetiba, at this stage of her career, does not yet have Coppola's precision in the character study at the heart of the material. She is more invested in the political intrigue and the spectacle than in the interior life of her protagonist, and King of Boys pays a small price for that.
The film is also, it must be said, too long. At two hours and forty-nine minutes, it tests the patience of even the most invested viewers. Multiple reviewers noted that audiences at cinema screenings were visibly restless during the middle sections. A tighter cut — perhaps two hours and fifteen minutes — would have been a sharper film without losing the core of what makes it great.
But here is the thing about King of Boys: its flaws are the flaws of a filmmaker who is reaching. Adetiba is trying to make something genuinely large-scale and thematically ambitious, and the fact that she does not fully land every element of that ambition is less damning than it might sound. She gets enough of it right — the central performance, the political texture, the feminist core of the story, the Lagos setting as living character — that the film earns its place as a landmark.
The Feminist Heart of King of Boys
One of the most significant things about King of Boys that does not get discussed enough is what it means that this film exists at all — that a woman wrote and directed a nearly three-hour crime epic about a female mob boss and it became one of the most commercially successful Nigerian films of its year.
Eniola Salami is operating in a world defined by male power. The gang lords at her table tolerate her because she is more powerful than them, not because they accept female leadership naturally. The politicians who used her are patronising even in their gratitude. When she tries to move into legitimate politics, the barriers are explicit: women are not supposed to be here.
And yet Eniola does not frame herself as a feminist. She is not fighting for women in general — she is fighting for herself, specifically and ferociously. The film does not offer her as a role model in any conventional sense. She is capable of terrible things. But she is also capable of them in a genre that has almost always reserved that capability for men.
As one critic noted, King of Boys puts "a matriarchal spin on the quintessential gangster film." That is exactly right. And in a culture where female characters in crime stories are usually wives, mothers, or victims — rarely the architect of the entire criminal architecture — Eniola Salami is a radical creation. Sola Sobowale's inhabitation of that character made her not just a Nollywood character but, for Nigerian audiences, something close to a cultural icon.
Lagos as a Character
King of Boys is, among other things, a great Lagos film. One of the best.
Adetiba uses the city the way the best urban crime directors use their settings — not as a backdrop but as a pressure system. The Lagos of King of Boys is simultaneously beautiful and menacing, generous and predatory. The wealthy and the criminal exist in the same spaces, connected by corruption, by money, by the fundamental Nigerian reality that the line between the formal economy and the underground is often thinner than it appears.
The film captures Lagos market culture, Lagos party culture, Lagos political culture, and Lagos street culture with an eye that clearly loves the city even as it holds a mirror to its darkest patterns. The density and the energy and the specific texture of Lagos life — the way deals get done, the way power is performed, the way status is communicated through fabric and food and ceremony — are all present and alive in the film's world. It is a film that could only have been made by someone who grew up in this city and carries it in their bones.
King of Boys: The Return of the King (2021) — The Netflix Sequel
When King of Boys: The Return of the King dropped on Netflix as a seven-episode limited series in August 2021, it made history: it became Netflix's first original Nigerian series. The sequel picks up with Eniola returning to Nigeria after years of exile following the devastating events of the original film. She has been given a governmental pardon and she wants to run for Governor of Lagos State.
What follows is a continuation of everything that made the original film compelling — the political intrigue, the betrayals, the power struggle — expanded into the serialised format with new characters and new dimensions of the Eniola we already knew.
What the sequel gets right:
The return of Sola Sobowale to a role she clearly understands in her bones is the series' greatest strength. If anything, the longer format gives Sobowale more room to explore Eniola's grief — her loss of her children in the original film haunts every episode of the sequel, and the series handles that grief with genuine care and intelligence. A scene where an exhausted, broken Eniola searches for her children's graves after years of absence is quietly devastating in a way the original film's faster pace could not have achieved.
Toni Tones returns as Young Eniola with increased screen time and even more impressive work than the original. Nse Ikpe-Etim as Jumoke Randle — the Lagos Governor's First Lady and Eniola's primary political antagonist — is a formidable addition to the franchise, a villain whose ambition and manipulation are entirely her own and entirely credible. Richard Mofe-Damijo, before his career-defining turn in The Black Book, shows up and does exactly what RMD does — commands every scene he is in.
The series is also more intentional about the representation of women in power. The sequel is sharply aware that in reality, women are barely accommodated in Nigerian politics, and it depicts this honestly rather than sanitising it for the sake of optimism.
What the sequel gets wrong:
The pacing issue that afflicted the original film is worse in the sequel. Seven episodes of one hour each is a significant amount of television to sustain, and the middle section of the series loses momentum in ways the original's unbroken film structure could compensate for. The "mafia infinity chess" quality of the plotting — characters moving pieces, forming alliances, staging confrontations — becomes repetitive when stretched over seven hours without sufficient variation in register or stakes.
The series finale has drawn criticism for feeling both rushed and convenient after the slower burn of the preceding episodes. And a subplot involving the Governor's mother and a "wicked mother-in-law" dynamic feels like an odd betrayal of the franchise's otherwise sophisticated approach to gender, as Afrocritik noted in its review.
The critical consensus on the series is that it is enjoyable and worthwhile but ultimately lives in the shadow of the original film rather than surpassing it. That is a fair verdict. But "enjoyable and worthwhile" is not nothing. And for what it achieves in expanding Eniola's world and bringing that world to a global audience through Netflix, it more than justifies its existence.
The Cultural Impact of King of Boys
The impact of King of Boys on Nollywood and on Nigerian culture cannot be overstated. A few metrics make the point clearly.
The original film set records for a non-comedy Nigerian film at the box office on its opening weekend, ultimately earning ₦245 million in Nigeria — making it the second highest-grossing Nollywood film of 2018. This was not a film that found its audience slowly. It announced itself immediately and loudly.
The sequel series became Netflix's first original Nigerian production, a milestone that changed the industry's relationship with global streaming. Without King of Boys, the conversation about Nigerian content on Netflix looks different. Without that conversation, films like The Black Book and Blood Sisters and To Kill a Monkey do not have the same platform.
The UK Parliament reference bears repeating because it is so extraordinary: in 2021, during a foreign affairs committee meeting, members of the British Parliament cited King of Boys in discussing Nigerian cultural export and soft power. A Nollywood film was mentioned in Westminster. That is not something that had happened before.
And Sola Sobowale — who was already beloved in Nigeria — became, through the franchise, a genuinely international figure. The character of Eniola Salami is now one of those Nollywood creations that people outside the Nigerian film industry know and reference. That is rare. That is the mark of something that transcended its medium.
Where to Watch King of Boys
- King of Boys (2018): Available on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video worldwide.
- King of Boys: The Return of the King (2021): Available exclusively on Netflix worldwide.
Should You Watch King of Boys?
Watch both if:
- You love political crime dramas with novelistic scope and moral complexity
- You want to understand why Sola Sobowale is considered one of the greatest Nigerian actors of her generation
- You are a fan of Kemi Adetiba and want to see her most ambitious work
- You enjoy comparing Nigerian crime storytelling to its global counterparts — The Godfather, Scarface, The Wire — and thinking about what Nigerian cinema does differently
- You have watched To Kill a Monkey and want to understand the Kemi Adetiba universe from its roots
Go in with adjusted expectations if:
- You struggle with films over two hours that don't maintain a tightly controlled pace
- You prefer crime stories where the moral lines are clearer
- You expect either film to fully resolve its storylines — this franchise lives in ambiguity
- You are bothered by visible plot holes and occasional lapses in realism
Our Verdict
King of Boys (2018): 8.5/10
Flawed, too long, occasionally clumsy — and still one of the most important films in Nollywood history. Sola Sobowale delivers a performance that alone justifies every minute of the running time. Kemi Adetiba swings for something enormous and connects far more often than she misses. The feminist reimagining of the gangster epic, set in a Lagos that is rendered with love and complexity, is a genuine artistic achievement. Watch it.
King of Boys: The Return of the King (2021): 7/10
A worthy and sometimes excellent sequel that suffers from the expanded format in ways the original's film structure could avoid. The grief at its centre is handled with real care. Nse Ikpe-Etim is a brilliant addition. Sola Sobowale reminds you, every episode, why this franchise exists. It does not match the original, but it extends the world meaningfully and brought Eniola Salami to a global audience that deserved to know her.
The Franchise as a Whole: Essential Nollywood.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Where can I watch King of Boys? The original King of Boys (2018) is available on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. The sequel series King of Boys: The Return of the King (2021) is available exclusively on Netflix.
Who plays Eniola Salami in King of Boys? Eniola Salami is played by veteran Nigerian actress Sola Sobowale in the present-day timeline, and by Toni Tones in the flashback sequences depicting her younger years.
Who directed King of Boys? Both the original film and the sequel series were written and directed by Kemi Adetiba under her production company Kemi Adetiba Visuals (KAV).
Is King of Boys based on a true story? No. King of Boys is a fictional story. However, its portrayal of the intersection between Nigerian organised crime and mainstream politics draws from documented realities of how power operates in Nigeria.
How long is King of Boys? The original film runs 2 hours and 49 minutes. The sequel is a 7-episode limited series with each episode running approximately one hour, for a total runtime of around 7 hours.
Is King of Boys: The Return of the King connected to the original? Yes. The sequel is a direct continuation of the original film's story and characters. Watching the original film first is essential — the sequel assumes familiarity with the events and characters of King of Boys (2018).
Did King of Boys make money? Yes. The original film earned ₦245 million at the Nigerian box office, making it one of the highest-grossing Nollywood films of 2018 and the second highest-grossing Nigerian film of that year.
What is King of Boys about? King of Boys follows Alhaja Eniola Salami, a Lagos businesswoman and philanthropist who is also the most powerful criminal figure in the city. When her political ambitions see her trying to cross from the underworld into mainstream politics, the resulting power struggle threatens everything she has built and everyone she loves.
Is King of Boys suitable for children? No. The film and series are rated TV-MA and contain violence, strong language, adult themes, and depictions of crime and political corruption. Recommended for adult audiences only.
Will there be a King of Boys 3? No official third instalment has been announced. However, the ending of the Netflix series leaves the franchise open for continuation, and given Kemi Adetiba's subsequent success with To Kill a Monkey, the appetite for more Eniola Salami seems strong on both sides of the camera.
Final Word
Eniola Salami walks into every room like she owns it. Because in the world of King of Boys, she does.
Kemi Adetiba created something with this franchise that Nollywood will be reckoning with for years. A female-written, female-directed, female-centred political crime epic that broke box office records, landed on Netflix, got mentioned in the British Parliament, and introduced the world to one of cinema's great contemporary performances.
It is not perfect. No film that swings this hard is. But King of Boys is the real thing — a work of genuine ambition and genuine craft, with a character at its centre whose story deserves to be told and a performance that makes you believe every word of it.
If you have not watched it yet, you are not fully caught up on what Nollywood is doing. Fix that.
Have you watched King of Boys? Is Eniola Salami the greatest character in Nollywood history? Drop your thoughts in the comments — and share this review with someone who is ready to enter the world of the King.
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