Today we are diving deep into the full review of To Kill a Monkey (2025), Kemi Adetiba's Netflix Nigerian crime thriller series starring William Benson and Bucci Franklin. Is it worth watching? Here's our honest, in-depth take.
Introduction: Kemi Adetiba Came Back. And She Did Not Come Quietly.
Seven years. That is how long Nollywood fans waited for Kemi Adetiba to return to the director's chair after the original King of Boys in 2018 rewrote the rules of what Nigerian crime storytelling could look and feel like. She gave us King of Boys: The Return of the King in 2021, yes, but that was a series — a continuation, an expansion. This was different. To Kill a Monkey is a fresh story, a new world, a brand new canvas. And the expectations? They were through the roof.
When Netflix dropped To Kill a Monkey on July 18, 2025, the Nigerian internet did not wait for permission to explode. The show hit number one on Netflix Nigeria within 72 hours. It cracked the Top 10 on Netflix UK, reaching No. 9 — a remarkable feat for a Nigerian series in its debut week. Hashtags like #ToKillAMonkey, #EfeEdewor, and #KemiAdetibaNetflix were trending across TikTok, X, and Instagram, in Nigeria, in the UK, and well beyond.
But here is what makes this moment interesting: To Kill a Monkey did not arrive to unanimous praise. It arrived to intense, passionate, sometimes fiercely divided conversation. Some viewers called it a masterpiece. Others called it overlong and underdeveloped. Some said Bucci Franklin delivered the performance of his career. Others said the pacing sagged so badly in the middle that they almost gave up. Some loved the moral ambiguity. Others wanted more clarity.
That division — that noise — is, in a strange way, the sign of a show that actually matters. Nobody argues passionately about things they do not care about. And whatever side of the fence you land on, To Kill a Monkey is the kind of Nollywood production that demands to be talked about.
This is our full, honest, deeply considered review. Let us get into it.
To Kill a Monkey (2025): The Quick Facts
Before we dig deep, here is everything you need at a glance:
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Title | To Kill a Monkey |
| Creator / Director / Writer / Producer | Kemi Adetiba |
| Co-Producer | Remi Adetiba |
| Production Company | Kemi Adetiba Visuals (KAV) |
| Streaming Platform | Netflix (Worldwide) |
| Release Date | July 18, 2025 |
| Format | Limited Series — 8 Episodes |
| Genre | Crime Thriller / Drama |
| Rating | TV-MA |
| IMDb Rating | 6.5/10 |
| Netflix Performance | No. 1 in Nigeria, No. 9 in UK Top 10 |
| Language | English, Nigerian Pidgin |
Cast: William Benson (Efemini "Efe" Edewor), Bucci Franklin (Oboz), Bimbo Akintola (Inspector Mo Ogunlesi), Stella Damasus (Nosa), Chidi Mokeme (Teacher), Ireti Doyle (SP Babalola), Teniola Aladese (Ivie), Lilian Afegbai (Idia), Sunshine Rosman (Amanda Sparkles), Michael O. Ejoor (Inspector Onome), Constance Owoyomi, and others.
What Is To Kill a Monkey About? (Plot Summary)
To Kill a Monkey opens with a scene that immediately announces its tone and ambitions. A ritual. A dimly lit shrine. Young men on their knees, swearing blood oaths, their backs pierced, vowing their "life, blood, and flesh" to a mysterious masked boss. Before a single character has spoken a word of dialogue, Kemi Adetiba has told you: this is not going to be a comfortable watch.
The story centres on Efemini Edewor, universally known as Efe. When we meet him, he is a brilliant first-class tech graduate in Lagos — and he is drowning. He works a humiliating dead-end job at a restaurant, stealing the WiFi to teach himself programming after hours. He has a wife, Nosa (Stella Damasus), and children. He has dreams of selling his AI and malware software to a legitimate tech company. What he does not have is a way out. Life batters him from every direction: workplace sexual harassment by a superior, the sexual abuse of his daughter at the hands of a family member, a newborn too hungry because his wife is too malnourished to produce milk. Someone even swaps his laptop for a piece of wood. The indignities pile up without mercy.
Then Oboz appears.
Obozuhiomwem — Oboz — is played by Bucci Franklin with the kind of live-wire charisma that makes you understand immediately why Efe can't say no. They knew each other at university, where Efe once saved Oboz's life during a cultist attack. Now Oboz runs a cybercrime empire out of Lagos, a "yahoo" kingpin with a fake logistics business as cover and a very real fraud operation underneath. He pays off Efe's debts. He offers him a seat at the table.
Efe refuses. He has principles. He has a family. He has a code.
And then life breaks him one more time. And he goes back to Oboz's door and asks for soap — in Nigerian street parlance, the informal entry point into the Yahoo Boys world. The moment Efe says that, the series truly begins. Because from there, it is all spiral. Efe brings Oboz a cutting-edge idea: using artificial intelligence to impersonate victims' loved ones, a new level of cybercrime sophistication. Oboz is floored. They become partners. Four years pass in a montage, and they are cybercrime royalty.
But at the other end of the story, watching all of this unfold, is Inspector Motunrayo "Mo" Ogunlesi, played by Bimbo Akintola. She has just been promoted at the Nigerian Cybercrime Commission when a tragic car crash kills her entire family in a single day. The trauma shatters her — she begins seeing things, hearing voices, living with PTSD. Her obsession with what becomes known as "The Monkey Case" is the anchor pulling her through her grief. Mo wants justice. But the system she operates in is compromised, and the further she pushes, the more violently it pushes back.
Then Teacher arrives. Played by Chidi Mokeme, Teacher is the original godfather of the cybercrime world Efe and Oboz have been quietly dominating. He wants a share. Oboz refuses. And suddenly the series, which had been a slow-burn moral drama, erupts into war: drive-bys, car bombs, assassination attempts, and a body count that keeps climbing.
At its core, To Kill a Monkey is a story about what happens to people when systems fail them so comprehensively that crime becomes not a choice but a calculation. It is about what the "monkey" really is — a symbol, the series suggests, not just of the scammer, but of all of us trapped in a cycle we did not design and cannot easily escape.
What Does "To Kill a Monkey" Mean? The Title Explained
This is one of the most searched questions about the series, and it deserves a real answer.
In Nigerian slang, "monkey" has historically been used as a derogatory term for cybercriminals — the Yahoo Boys, internet fraudsters. The term carries contempt, the implication being that these criminals are animals, base and unthinking.
What Kemi Adetiba does with the title is deliberately subversive. In the world of the series, "The Monkey" is the name of Oboz's cybercrime syndicate — embraced, not apologised for. The monkey calling card the syndicate leaves behind for victims is a statement of identity, almost a badge of pride. Oboz and his crew have reclaimed the slur and turned it into a brand.
But the title goes deeper than branding. As one reviewer noted, the "monkey" symbolises not only the victim of a con game, but perhaps all of us — the players who are stuck in systems that make us prey on each other to live. The monkey is Efe, desperate and cornered. The monkey is the victims of the fraud. The monkey is Mo, hunted by a grief she cannot outrun. The monkey is all of Nigeria, trapped in cycles of economic failure and moral compromise that no single individual created.
To kill a monkey is to break the cycle. Or to try. Whether the series believes that is truly possible is one of its most interesting open questions.
Kemi Adetiba: A Filmmaker at the Height of Her Powers
There is a review of To Kill a Monkey from TheCable Lifestyle that compares Kemi Adetiba to a "Hip-hop turntablist, sampling classic riffs with dexterity, always finding a fresh Nigerian flip." That is exactly right. And it is what makes her such a singular presence in Nollywood.
Adetiba came up as a music video director — she directed some of the most iconic visuals in Nigerian music history. That background is visible in every frame of To Kill a Monkey. She thinks cinematically, instinctively, in images and rhythms. The way she uses lighting, especially around the character of Teacher (Chidi Mokeme), is deliberate and intelligent — his scenes are always kept in shadow, reinforcing his sinister, barely-seen quality. She shoots Lagos with textural love: the neon lights, the back alleys, the gritty contrast between Lagos poverty and Lagos wealth existing blocks apart.
Her references are worn openly. Critics have noted nods to Scarface, Goodfellas, The Godfather, and Michael Mann's intimate crime dramas. A scene involving Oboz's breakdown in a crowded restaurant has been compared to the "say goodnight to the bad guy" moment from Scarface — but set in Lagos, with Nigerian specificity baked into every gesture and word choice. That specificity is the difference between influence and imitation. Adetiba is influenced by world cinema, yes. But she is not copying it. She is translating it into something that could only come from Nigeria.
What she gets absolutely right in To Kill a Monkey is tone. This is a dark show, but not nihilistic. It takes its characters seriously as human beings rather than types. It does not glamourise the cybercrime world, but it also refuses the easy moral condemnation that would let the audience off the hook too quickly. Watching Efe make his choices, you understand them even as you are troubled by them. That moral complexity — what one critic called the show's willingness to "hold Nigerian society up to a very taut and honest mirror" — is Adetiba's greatest achievement here.
William Benson as Efe: A Star Is Definitively Born
If there is one thing virtually every review of To Kill a Monkey agrees on, it is this: William Benson is extraordinary.
Benson is a veteran of Nigerian theatre with over three decades of stage experience, but for many Netflix viewers, To Kill a Monkey was their first proper introduction to him. That introduction is unforgettable.
His performance as Efe is an exercise in controlled descent. He does not play Efe's corruption as a single dramatic moment of choice. He plays it as an accumulation — of humiliations, of failures, of dignities stripped away one by one, until the man who was once principled becomes someone who simply cannot afford principles any more. You root for Efe. You understand Efe. And you are appalled by what Efe becomes. Sometimes in the same scene.
That range is the work of a deeply skilled actor who knows precisely what he is doing and why. Benson reportedly brings his theatre background to the role in the most productive way possible — not in the theatrical "big moment" sense, but in the deeply committed understanding of character that stage work demands. He inhabits Efe rather than performing him. The difference is palpable.
One review described watching Benson as a man you will "root for, hate, and want to slap — sometimes in the same scene." That is the exact response a morally complex anti-hero should produce. It is exactly what the role demanded. And Benson delivers it in full.
Bucci Franklin as Oboz: The Absolute Show-Stealer
If William Benson is the moral heart of To Kill a Monkey, Bucci Franklin as Oboz is its beating, chaotic, dangerous pulse.
Franklin has been a respected presence in Nigerian cinema for years, but To Kill a Monkey gives him the role he was born to play. Oboz is a former campus cultist turned cybercrime kingpin — a man of enormous charisma, terrifying violence, and a buried vulnerability that Franklin makes devastatingly real. He is Efe's tempter, his protector, his destroyer, and in his own broken way, his friend.
What Franklin does with the character goes beyond stereotype. He makes Oboz a living, breathing person with his own contradictions and logic. His pidgin is completely fluent and natural. His physicality — the rugged gestures, the eyes that are always calculating even in moments of apparent generosity — communicates a man who has survived by reading every room he ever entered. One reviewer described Franklin's Oboz as a "Mephistophelian" figure whose manipulations compel attention. That is the right word. He is the devil Efe makes his deal with. And like all good devils in literature and film, he is dangerously likeable.
Several critics have called Franklin's performance one of the most magnetic Nigerian screen portrayals of 2025. Watching the show, it is not hard to understand why. Every scene he is in crackles with electricity. And the moments where Oboz's armour cracks — where you see the cultist who was once a boy on his knees at a shrine, swearing oaths he could not fully understand — are genuinely moving. Franklin does not play Oboz as simply monstrous. He plays him as a product. Of his choices, yes, but also of everything that shaped those choices.
The chemistry between Franklin and Benson is the engine of the whole series. Their scenes together carry the weight of a real, complicated friendship — the kind that can survive almost anything and ultimately cannot survive everything.
Bimbo Akintola and the Supporting Cast
Bimbo Akintola as Inspector Mo Ogunlesi has one of the harder tasks in the series. Mo is a character who is simultaneously grieving, obsessed, compromised, and morally driven. The writing does not always serve her as well as it serves Efe and Oboz, and her arc in the later episodes draws some criticism for erratic behaviour that feels more like a plot device than a character choice. But Akintola, a genuinely formidable actress, does everything she can with the material. Her fragility in the scenes where Mo's PTSD surfaces is real and affecting. She makes you feel the cost of Mo's obsession even when the writing can't quite decide what to do with it.
Chidi Mokeme as Teacher is meant to be the show's apex predator — the big bad who enters the story in the middle episodes and turns the stakes up to maximum. Mokeme is a compelling screen presence, and his arrival does create genuine menace. The criticism that has been levelled at Teacher — that he is "introduced through dialogue" and relies too heavily on repeated threats rather than substantive action — is fair, but it is largely a writing problem rather than a performance problem. Mokeme does what he can.
Stella Damasus as Nosa, Efe's wife, brings warmth and patience to a character whose role is inevitably to be the conscience and the collateral damage of Efe's choices. Teniola Aladese as Ivie, Efe's daughter, carries significant emotional weight in some of the series' most harrowing scenes. Lilian Afegbai as Idia, Oboz's widow, has a presence that many viewers found deeply affecting, particularly in the show's final moments.
Ireti Doyle, as SP Babalola, is used sparingly but effectively.
Production Values: Lagos Has Never Looked Like This
One of the clearest signals that Kemi Adetiba Visuals has reached a new level with To Kill a Monkey is the production design.
The show was made with a level of meticulous attention to visual detail that is immediately apparent from the opening frames. The costume and set designs are precise — every location feels inhabited and real rather than staged. The lighting choices are among the most intelligent in recent Nigerian television: the shrine scenes carry a sinister, almost supernatural glow; the cybercrime operation has a cold, fluorescent anonymity; Efe's home environments are warm but worn, visually telling the story of his poverty before he speaks a word about it.
Cinematographically, To Kill a Monkey captures Lagos in what IMDb reviewers described as its "raw beauty" — the neon lights, the shadows, the streets that feel alive, "almost like the city itself is a character in the story." That is precisely what the best urban crime dramas do. The city is never just a backdrop. It is a pressure system. And the camera understands that.
The score by Oscar Heman-Ackah is genuinely brilliant — sweeping, textured, emotionally intelligent. The criticism that it is too omnipresent, that it sometimes competes with rather than supports the scenes, is widely shared and not entirely unfair. The show would benefit from more silence in its quieter moments. But the music itself, taken on its own terms, is excellent work.
Where the production does not quite reach the standard it sets for itself is in a handful of action sequences. The logic of a particular explosion scene, for example, has drawn pointed criticism from viewers who noted the physics do not hold up under scrutiny. These are not career-defining flaws, but they are visible in a show that otherwise sets a high standard for itself.
What To Kill a Monkey Gets Right
The Central Relationship
The Efe-Oboz dynamic is the show's beating heart, and Adetiba nurtures it with real care. She understands that the most interesting crime stories are not about crime itself but about the human relationships that crime both depends on and destroys. The toxic co-dependency between Efe and Oboz — who need each other, cannot fully trust each other, and ultimately betray each other — is the thread that holds all eight episodes together.
The Economic Context
To Kill a Monkey understands something that most Nigerian crime stories do not dramatise with sufficient honesty: the degree to which the economic system pushes ordinary people toward extraordinary moral compromises. Efe is not a bad man who turns to crime. He is a brilliant man who is systematically failed by every legitimate institution he tries — employment, education, the law, the market — until crime is the only offer left on the table. That is not an excuse. The show does not offer it as one. But it is a cause, and naming it honestly takes courage.
The Moral Ambiguity
What separates To Kill a Monkey from most Nigerian thrillers is its refusal to offer easy moral resolution. This is not a show that waggles a disapproving finger at cybercriminals while secretly romanticising them. It is not a show that celebrates Efe's rise. The darkness is real, the consequences are real, and the audience is implicated in their sympathy for a fraudster whose victims are real people suffering real harm. That complexity is genuinely adult storytelling.
The Performances
William Benson and Bucci Franklin. Full stop.
What To Kill a Monkey Gets Wrong
Pacing
This is the most consistent criticism across every review this show has received, from audience comments on IMDb to critics at Afrocritik and African Business, and it is entirely valid. The first two episodes are tightly constructed. The middle episodes — particularly six and seven — lose momentum badly. Eight episodes was too long for this story. Many reviewers suggested the show would have been significantly stronger at six episodes, or reimagined as a two-hour-and-thirty-minute film. The plot does not have enough material to justify its runtime, and when it runs dry, the show substitutes bombastic events for genuine narrative development.
The Cybercrime World Feels Thin
For a show that is fundamentally about cybercrime, To Kill a Monkey is surprisingly uninterested in showing us how cybercrime actually works. Efe's big idea — using AI to impersonate victims' loved ones — is established as revolutionary and then never convincingly dramatised. We are told the operation generates billions of naira. We are never shown how. The mechanics of the Yahoo Boys world, the real and complex and ugly reality of how these operations function, are kept almost entirely off-screen. For a show that proudly claims to be holding a mirror up to Nigerian society, this is a significant evasion.
Some Characters Deserved More
Teacher is underwritten despite Chidi Mokeme's best efforts. Inspector Mo Ogunlesi's arc, particularly her PTSD, is handled with a lack of coherence in the later episodes that undermines what could have been one of the series' most moving threads. Several of the smaller character relationships are introduced and then abandoned. The show is clearly reaching for the novelistic scope of King of Boys and sometimes overextends into more plot than it can meaningfully resolve.
A Rushed Finale
The final episode rushes to its conclusion in a way that left many viewers feeling cheated. After six episodes of slow burn and two of escalating chaos, the ending lands with less weight than the journey earned. Some plot threads are left dangling in ways that feel less like deliberate ambiguity and more like unfinished business.
How Does To Kill a Monkey Compare to King of Boys?
This comparison is inevitable, and Adetiba herself seems aware of it — the show carries DNA from her earlier work throughout its eight episodes.
King of Boys (2018) is, for many people, Kemi Adetiba's masterpiece. It is a complete, ferociously confident vision of Nigerian power, crime, and gender from a filmmaker who knew exactly what story she was telling and told it without a wasted frame. The sequel series had its moments but is widely considered less successful than the original film.
To Kill a Monkey sits somewhere between the two. It is more ambitious than the KOB series in its thematic reach. It has better performances in its lead roles than either KOB project. It looks more expensive and technically accomplished. But it lacks the narrative cohesion of the original King of Boys film. It cannot quite decide what kind of show it wants to be — intimate character study or operatic crime epic — and sometimes tries to be both simultaneously, with mixed results.
What it shares with King of Boys is Adetiba's undeniable directorial fingerprint: the love of grand set pieces, the willingness to tackle uncomfortable Nigerian realities head-on, the instinct for casting that elevates the material, and the absolute refusal to make something safe.
Why To Kill a Monkey Still Matters
For all its flaws — and they are real, worth naming, and worth thinking about — To Kill a Monkey matters. It matters for Nollywood, for African cinema, and for the global conversation about what Nigerian storytelling can be.
It matters because it found William Benson and put him where the world could see him. It matters because it gave Bucci Franklin the role he should have had years ago. It matters because it treats cybercrime — one of the defining anxieties of contemporary Nigerian society — as a subject worthy of genuine moral and artistic seriousness rather than an exploitative backdrop.
It matters because Kemi Adetiba made it. And Kemi Adetiba, whatever her flaws as a storyteller, is one of the clearest voices in Nigerian cinema. Every project she makes enlarges what Nollywood is capable of imagining about itself.
It matters because it topped Netflix Nigeria and cracked the Top 10 in the UK. Because it proves, again, that there is a global audience hungry for Nigerian stories told with ambition and craft and specificity.
And it matters because, weeks after watching it, you are still thinking about Efe. About that moment when he walked back to Oboz's door and asked for soap. About whether there was another choice. About all the systems that made sure there wasn't.
That is what great storytelling does. It stays with you. And for all its imperfections, To Kill a Monkey stays with you.
Should You Watch To Kill a Monkey?
Watch it if:
- You loved King of Boys or Blood Sisters and want more serious Nigerian crime drama
- You are interested in the real anxieties of contemporary Nigerian society — cybercrime, economic desperation, institutional failure
- You want to see two of the best Nigerian male performances of 2025
- You enjoy crime dramas with genuine moral complexity and no easy answers
- You like shows that spark conversation and debate
Go in with adjusted expectations if:
- You prefer tight, fast-paced eight-episode series with no filler
- You are expecting a technically accurate portrayal of cybercrime operations
- You want a fully satisfying, tied-up-in-a-bow finale
- You struggled with the pacing of King of Boys: The Return of the King
Our Verdict
To Kill a Monkey is a flawed, ambitious, frequently brilliant piece of Nigerian television that does more right than it does wrong, even when it is infuriating.
William Benson gives what might be the finest leading male performance in Nigerian streaming television to date. Bucci Franklin steals every scene he is in and makes Oboz one of the most memorable characters in recent Nollywood history. Kemi Adetiba directs with a cinematic intelligence and formal confidence that few Nigerian directors can match.
The pacing problems are real. The finale disappoints. The cybercrime world is thinner than it should be. These are not minor criticisms. But they are the criticisms of a show that reached for something significant and came close enough that the shortfall hurts precisely because you can see what it was trying to be.
Watch it. Argue about it. Feel things about Efe that make you uncomfortable. That discomfort is the point.
Our Rating: 7.5/10
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Where can I watch To Kill a Monkey? To Kill a Monkey is streaming exclusively on Netflix worldwide.
Who created To Kill a Monkey? The series was written, directed, and produced by Kemi Adetiba, Nigeria's acclaimed filmmaker known for King of Boys. She co-produced it alongside her brother Remi Adetiba through Kemi Adetiba Visuals (KAV).
How many episodes does To Kill a Monkey have? To Kill a Monkey is an eight-episode limited series.
Who stars in To Kill a Monkey? The main cast includes William Benson (Efe), Bucci Franklin (Oboz), Bimbo Akintola (Inspector Mo Ogunlesi), Stella Damasus (Nosa), Chidi Mokeme (Teacher), Ireti Doyle (SP Babalola), Teniola Aladese (Ivie), Lilian Afegbai (Idia), Sunshine Rosman (Amanda Sparkles), and Michael O. Ejoor (Inspector Onome).
Is To Kill a Monkey based on a true story? No. The series is a fictional story. However, its themes of cybercrime (Yahoo Boys), economic desperation in Lagos, and institutional corruption are drawn closely from real Nigerian social realities.
What does "To Kill a Monkey" mean? In Nigerian street language, "monkey" is a derogatory term for cybercriminals. The show reclaims the term as the name of Oboz's crime syndicate, and uses it symbolically to comment on how systems trap people into preying on each other to survive.
Is To Kill a Monkey connected to King of Boys? No. To Kill a Monkey is a completely separate story with different characters. However, it comes from the same creator — Kemi Adetiba — and shares her signature style: large ensembles, Nigerian political and social critique, and operatic crime storytelling.
Is To Kill a Monkey suitable for children? No. The series is rated TV-MA and contains strong language, violence, sexual themes, and mature subject matter throughout.
Will there be a Season 2 of To Kill a Monkey? No official Season 2 has been announced at the time of writing. However, the ending leaves room for continuation, and given the series' strong performance on Netflix, further instalments are a reasonable expectation.
Final Word
When you watch To Kill a Monkey and see Efe standing at a crossroads — brilliant, broke, beaten — you do not see a criminal. You see a man the system has run out of road for. And that is what makes Kemi Adetiba's latest work resonate so deeply, even in its most imperfect moments.
Nigeria knows that man. Africa knows that man. The world, increasingly, is coming to know that man through the stories Nollywood is telling.
To Kill a Monkey is not perfect. But it is real. And in 2025, that might be the more important achievement.
Have you watched To Kill a Monkey? Who did you think was the standout performer — William Benson or Bucci Franklin? Tell us in the comments. And share this review with someone who needs a new Nollywood binge recommendation.
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