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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Phil Hoad

3 Cold Dishes review – Burna Boy produces deftly directed revenge tales with echoes of Kill Bill

Seeking revenge … 3 Cold Dishes.
Seeking revenge … 3 Cold Dishes. Photograph: Publicity image

Directed by self-taught film-maker Asurf Oluseyi and produced by rapper Burna Boy, this Nollywood thriller brings Tarantinoesque swagger to the Abidjan-Lagos corridor. The story is a femme-first revenge spree after the three protagonists fall foul of human traffickers, and starts as a show-offy multistrand affair with chapter intertitles that are Kill Bill yellow. While the preamble suffers from some garbled storytelling, and the staging is occasionally shaky, this cross-border caper mostly styles it out to engaging effect.

Former streetwalker Janice (Amelie Mbaye) narrates to a journalist the tale of the triple threat she took under her wing in 2002: young Ivorian Fatouma (Fat Touré), tricked into slavery by her pastor who lures her with the promise of a footballing contract in Paris; Esosa (Osas Ighodaro) from Nigeria, similarly hoodwinked by her uncle (Nollywood stalwart Wale Ojo) and smuggled to Abidjan; and Giselle (Maud Guerard), a waif prone to supernatural possession sold by her grandmother to a local chief, who kicks things off by gang-raping her. After their pimp is killed in a police raid, the trio resurface 16 years later as armed robbers with a bulging contacts list of shady enablers. They co-opt Janice into their plan: abduct the three hoodlums who hijacked them in 2002 and ladle out a big helping of the dish best served cold.

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