There's a moment about a third of the way into "Brotherhood" where I realized I was watching a genuinely different kind of Nollywood film than the ones I'd sat with recently — not necessarily better in every department, but reaching for something visually and structurally more ambitious than a lot of its peers. It's a crime thriller that clearly wants to be spoken about in the same breath as glossy international heist and gang dramas, and for long stretches, it earns that comparison. Whether it fully sustains it across the entire runtime is a different question.
What "Brotherhood" Is Actually About
The setup is a classic crime-drama premise executed with real emotional stakes attached: twin brothers, Wale and Akin Adetula, watch their parents get murdered on New Year's Day, on their way home from a cross-over church service, while they're still just children. That's a brutal, formative wound to build an entire story around, and the film uses it well — everything that follows traces back to two boys who had to fight to survive on the streets of Lagos after losing everything in a single violent night.
As adults, the twins end up on opposite sides of the law. Wale, played by Falz, joins a police task force. Akin, played by Tobi Bakre, ends up with a criminal record and, after his most recent stint in prison, falls in with the Ojuju Boys — a notorious gang that specializes in robbing bullion vans and banks. The film's central tension comes from an almost unbearable irony: Wale's police unit is eventually assigned to hunt down the very gang his own twin brother now runs with, forcing a reckoning where duty and blood loyalty are set on a direct collision course.
It's a strong premise, and I think it's worth saying plainly: the emotional foundation here is genuinely compelling on paper. Twin brothers separated not by choice but by circumstance, one forced to become the hunter of the other — that's the kind of setup that, handled well, produces real tragic weight. The question is how much of that potential the film actually cashes in.
A Behind-the-Scenes Wrinkle Worth Knowing About
Before getting further into the film itself, there's a genuinely interesting production detail that colors how I think about some of the film's rougher patches. According to reporting at the time, Ugandan filmmaker Loukman Ali, credited as the film's director, reportedly disassociated himself from the project during production, citing creative differences with the studio. Depending on which account you read, the film was either completed without a credited director for a period, or Ali's directorial credit was simply retained despite the dispute — most official sources, including Wikipedia and Rotten Tomatoes, still list him as director.
I mention this not to dwell on industry drama for its own sake, but because it's genuinely useful context for a film that feels, at points, like it's being pulled in two different directions tonally — sometimes reaching for grounded, melodramatic family tragedy in the old Nollywood tradition, and other times reaching for slick, Western-influenced genre filmmaking with stylized action and moody color grading. One Letterboxd reviewer put this tension nicely, describing the film as "modern, and full of western influences" while still having "the melodramatic heart of old Nollywood beating at its core." Knowing there may have been a genuine behind-the-scenes creative rift makes that tonal push-and-pull feel less like a deliberate artistic choice and more like the visible seam of two different visions competing for the same film.
The Look of the Thing: Genuinely Impressive Craft
Whatever else you want to say about "Brotherhood," it's hard to deny that this is a good-looking film, and by a meaningful margin better-looking than a lot of its Nollywood contemporaries. One reviewer, watching their very first Nollywood film with this title, was genuinely floored by the cinematography and production design, going so far as to compare it to "Wes Anderson level" visual precision — an unusual comparison for this genre, and one that speaks to how deliberately composed a lot of the film's frames are. The color grading in particular does real narrative work; several viewers noted how effectively it builds a persistent sense of danger and mortality, giving even quieter scenes a visual undercurrent that death could be waiting around the next corner.
The action sequences hold up reasonably well too. One enthusiastic IMDb reviewer even jokingly rated the action above Marvel's "Iron Fist" — not a compliment I'd necessarily co-sign at face value, but it gestures toward something true: for a Nigerian production working with considerably less money than a Hollywood blockbuster, the heist and shootout sequences are staged with real confidence rather than the awkward, undercooked action choreography that's sometimes been a fair criticism of earlier Nollywood crime films.
The soundtrack deserves specific credit too. One reviewer, admittedly a self-described stickler for these details, went out of their way to note that every song in the film is Nigerian in origin, performed by Nigerian artists, and that the music selection consistently matched the tone of each individual scene rather than feeling like a generic licensed playlist bolted on afterward. That same reviewer also praised the subtitle work specifically, noting it was handled with genuine care and free of the grammatical sloppiness that's sometimes been a fair, if slightly unkind, running joke about Nollywood subtitling more broadly.
The Performances: Falz's Real Surprise, and a Roster of Familiar Faces
Falz, better known primarily as a musician and comedic actor, plays distinctly against type here as Wale, and it's genuinely one of the more interesting casting choices in the film. Playing a police officer torn between institutional duty and blood loyalty to his twin brother requires a level of internal conflict and restraint that's quite different from the comedic energy Falz has built much of his public persona around, and by most accounts, he pulls it off convincingly enough to surprise viewers who came in with lower expectations based on his other work.
Tobi Bakre, as Akin, draws consistent praise across reviews, with more than one commenter specifically calling out his performance as a highlight — one review on a Nollywood database site simply noted, with evident enthusiasm, that "Tobi outdid himself." There's a real physicality and simmering danger to how he plays a man who's spent his entire adult life on the wrong side of the law, and the film generally trusts him with its heaviest emotional lifting whenever the plot calls for it.
The supporting cast is stacked with familiar Nigerian entertainment names — Basketmouth, Sam Dede, Ronke Oshodi Oke, Toni Tones, Zubby Michael, and Mr Macaroni among them — and this is genuinely a mixed bag. Several of these actors bring real presence to their roles; others draw a more pointed criticism that's come up repeatedly around this film specifically: a frustration, expressed bluntly by at least one Letterboxd reviewer, that Nollywood keeps leaning on social media personalities and comedians for dramatic roles rather than trained dramatic actors, regardless of whether the performer's skill set actually suits the material. Mr Macaroni, primarily known for social media comedy skits, is often the specific example pointed to in that critique, though it's worth noting he's far from the only comedian-turned-actor in the current Nollywood ecosystem, and the practice itself is a broader industry pattern rather than something unique to this film.
Where the Film Runs Into Trouble
For as much visual polish as "Brotherhood" has, it's not without real, structural problems, and I think it's worth being specific about them rather than waving them away because the film looks good.
Pacing is probably the most consistently cited issue. At just under two hours, several reviewers felt the film needed real trimming — one IMDb review specifically suggested at least twenty minutes could have been cut, arguing the story's actual narrative meat doesn't require the full runtime it's given. There's also a fair critique that the film could have used more time on its heist sequences rather than less — one reviewer specifically wished for a slightly longer, more detailed taste of the actual robbery mechanics and planning, feeling the film rushes past exactly the kind of procedural tension that makes heist narratives satisfying in other genre films.
Realism is another recurring sticking point. Multiple reviewers pointed to specific action beats — a bridge sequence gets singled out more than once — as stretching plausibility past the breaking point, the kind of moment where audiences collectively know a character shouldn't have survived what just happened, but the film asks you to accept it anyway for the sake of momentum. There's also a broader criticism that the film leans too heavily on genre stereotypes rather than building fully original character beats — cops, gang lieutenants, and criminal hierarchies that hit fairly familiar notes rather than subverting them in interesting ways.
The script and directing also drew some pointed criticism from at least one first-time Nollywood viewer, who felt that while the visual craft was exceptional, Loukman Ali (or whoever ultimately steered the film to completion, given the behind-the-scenes uncertainty) didn't always succeed in directing performances toward realism, resulting in scenes that look and sound less grounded than the film's polished visual language would suggest they should. That's a genuinely interesting critique, because it suggests a film whose ambitions in cinematography and score outpaced its ambitions — or perhaps its resources — in performance direction and dialogue naturalism.
One reviewer, more experienced with international film production standards, put it in a way I found genuinely fair: it's clear this was, in some meaningful sense, still a "novice production," and while it delivered some genuinely impressive moments for an African film production working at this scale, consulting a more seasoned filmmaking hand earlier in the process could plausibly have smoothed out several of its rougher edges.
A Genuinely Significant Commercial and Continental Moment
Whatever its artistic unevenness, "Brotherhood" mattered commercially in a way that's worth taking seriously. It had a genuinely rare pan-African theatrical release, opening simultaneously on September 23, 2022, across a dozen countries — Nigeria, Cameroon, Benin Republic, Burkina Faso, Togo, Niger Republic, Senegal, Congo, Rwanda, Gabon, Guinea, and Madagascar — with additional plans for an Abidjan release as well. That's a genuinely ambitious distribution strategy, one that reflects both the growing number of functioning cinemas across the African continent and a deliberate push by the production team to position Nollywood output as genuinely pan-African entertainment rather than a purely Nigerian domestic product.
The film went on to become, as of December 2024, the eighth highest-grossing Nigerian film in Nigerian cinema history — a genuinely strong commercial result, and one that several sources at the time even described as the single highest-grossing Nigerian film of 2022 specifically. Adebola Williams, chairman of AW Network and one of the film's executive producers, was fairly explicit about the ambition behind the project at the time, stating that "Brotherhood" would help usher in "a new era of fearless filmmaking" in African cinema, with AW Network positioning its partnership with producer Jade Osiberu as part of a deliberate push to expand what Nigerian storytelling could look like on a bigger, more internationally competitive scale.
That framing is worth taking seriously, even if the film itself doesn't fully live up to it in every scene. "Brotherhood" is clearly reaching for something more polished and internationally minded than a lot of Nollywood crime dramas that came before it, and a meaningful part of its audience response — the reviews praising its cinematography, its needle-drops, its production design — suggests that reach genuinely registered with viewers, even among those who also flagged its pacing and realism problems in the same breath.
Is the Emotional Core Strong Enough to Carry It?
Ultimately, I think the film's success or failure for any individual viewer comes down to how much you're willing to let the emotional premise — two brothers, orphaned together, now hunting and being hunted by each other — carry you through the rougher patches in pacing and dialogue. When the film leans into that central relationship, particularly in scenes where Falz and Bakre share the screen and the weight of their shared history is allowed to breathe, "Brotherhood" genuinely works. The tragedy of their situation feels real, not because every line of dialogue sells it perfectly, but because the underlying premise is strong enough to do a lot of that work on its own.
Where the film wobbles is in the connective tissue around that core relationship — the heist mechanics that could have used more room to breathe, the supporting performances that range from strong to noticeably uneven, and a runtime that occasionally overstays scenes that don't need the extra time they're given.
Final Verdict
"Brotherhood" is a film with real ambition and genuine visual craft, anchored by a strong central performance from Tobi Bakre and a surprisingly effective dramatic turn from Falz, working from a premise — twin brothers split by tragedy onto opposite sides of the law — that's genuinely strong enough to carry real emotional weight. It's let down by pacing that runs longer than the story needs, some uneven supporting performances, and action beats that occasionally sacrifice believability for momentum.
It's also, undeniably, a significant moment in recent Nollywood history — a pan-African theatrical release on a scale few Nigerian productions have attempted, and a commercial success that helped make the case for bigger, more internationally ambitious Nigerian filmmaking. Whether you come away impressed or mildly frustrated will likely depend on how much weight you put on style versus substance. I landed somewhere in between: genuinely entertained by what "Brotherhood" gets right, and quietly wishing a tighter edit and a steadier directorial hand had let its genuinely strong premise hit as hard as it deserved to.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 — a visually confident, commercially significant crime thriller with a strong emotional premise and a standout Tobi Bakre performance, held back by uneven pacing and some shaky realism in its bigger action beats.
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