Agesinkole 2 Review: The Legend Returns, But His Story Struggles

When Agesinkole first rode into the fictional kingdom of Ajeromi in 2022, he arrived on a wave of genuine surprise. Directed by Tope Adebayo Salami and Adebayo Tijani, the first King of Thieves was a statement film, proof that a Yoruba-language epic could command cinemas, sustain a mythology, and carry the cultural weight of its subject without apology. Rich with ijinlé Yoruba dialogue, the kind thick with proverbs and incantations that root the language in its own authority, the film established Femi Adebayo’s Agesinkole as one of Nollywood’s most arresting screen presences: a man of few words whose silences said everything.

Three years on, King of Thieves: Agesinkole 2, directed by Adebayo Tijani and now streaming on Netflix, returns to that world with a cast that has only grown in stature and ambitions that have clearly expanded in scale. What it brings back with less certainty is the narrative coherence that gave the first film its weight.

The First Kingdom: What the Original Built

Agensinkole established its world with a confidence that Nollywood epics had not always demonstrated. The first film was a story of betrayal and vengeance set in pre-colonial Yoruba society, following an all-powerful bandit whose reign of terror on the kingdom of Ajeromi concealed a deeper reckoning. The cultural immersion was among its strongest qualities: the wardrobe, the proverbs, the palace architecture, the invocation of Sango, the masquerades. Cinematographer Idowu Adedapo gave the film a visual sweep that made its world feel inhabited rather than constructed, and the Yoruba language itself performed as a character, carrying meaning that a translation could only gesture at.

Its limitations were real but containable. The king, Oba Adegbite as played by Odunlade Adekola, remained largely reactive across the film’s runtime. A man whose kingdom is being terrorised should, at some point, act like a commander-in-chief. The film gave him worry and pain without giving him agency, and the absence of that agency created a vacuum at the dramatic centre that the bandit’s own energy could not entirely fill. The framing device of a narrator in a present-day gallery also sat awkwardly, an overlay the story did not require and which the ending redeems only partially, with a glimmer in the narrator’s eye that signals Agesinkole’s imminent return.

That glimmer is exactly where part two begins.

A New Kingdom, A Familiar Problem

Agensinkole 2 opens with something unexpected and immediately arresting: images of protest, of people pushing back against a system that has turned against them, drawn deliberately close enough to Nigeria’s 2020 EndSARS protests to be felt in the body before they are processed in the mind. The connection between the injustice of the ancient kingdom and the injustice of the present is made visible in those opening frames, and it is the most politically charged thing the film attempts. Corruption, the film suggests, is not a historical problem. It is a living inheritance.

The promise of that opening is considerable. A Yoruba epic that uses its mythological framework to interrogate contemporary Nigerian power structures, the silence of institutions, the complicity of those who benefit from rot, could be something genuinely resonant. The drums of Agesinkole’s return positioned as a response to EndSARS-era injustice is a powerful idea. The film, however, does not follow through on it with the commitment the idea deserves. The political undercurrent runs below the surface of the story rather than through it, felt in atmosphere but rarely acted upon in plot or character.

What Ajeromi faces in this sequel is a familiar diagnosis: peace has made its rulers comfortable, comfortable has made them corrupt, and corruption has returned so thoroughly that the balance Agesinkole once restored is once again undone. A new king reigns. New betrayals have taken hold. A forbidden love between Pero and Ishola sets off a chain of events that intersects with the kingdom’s larger crisis. And somewhere in the background, the old forces that sealed Agesinkole away are being tampered with.

The story as a premise is sound enough. The execution is where the film loses its footing. Several subplots are introduced with urgency and resolved without the earned development that would justify their proportion of the runtime. Pero and Ishola’s dynamic is the clearest example: a romance between characters whose connection is established quickly and whose emotional logic never quite convinces. There is a moment near the film’s end where Pero explains that she fled because she discovered she was to be sold into marriage. The audience, however, was never shown her discovering this. The information reaches her between scenes, without a moment of revelation that would let the audience witness it alongside her. It is one of several instances where the film jumps emotional transitions it should have constructed.

The ending compounds the problem. Agesinkole’s return, the event the entire film has been building toward, is triggered by a motivation that the story has not prepared us for. When the reason is finally given, it arrives as an afterthought dressed as explanation. The audience deserved a different architecture for this moment, one in which the characters who have been most wronged by the kingdom’s rot are the ones who, through their own agency, set the reckoning in motion. That version of the story would have completed the character arcs the film spent ninety minutes establishing. What the film gives us instead feels like a shortcut to an ending that the plot had not earned.

The Cast in a Kingdom That Needed More from Its Writing

Femi Adebayo remains a commanding presence whenever Agesinkole is on screen. The character operates at the level of myth, which means the performance must sustain both the physical authority of the bandit and the symbolic weight of what he represents. Adebayo does this with the same controlled intensity as the first film, speaking sparingly, filling silences with presence. Ibrahim Yekini as his right hand continues to be one of the franchise’s most reliable instruments, wicked with a subtlety that avoids the obvious.

Among the supporting cast, Yemi Solade, Gabriel Afolayan, and Kolawole Ajeyemi each bring a level of control and screen presence that elevates the scenes they occupy. They do the work of making their characters feel like people with interior lives even when the script has not given those lives enough room. Bimbo Akintola brings the kind of seasoned specificity that reminds you why a single experienced performer can change the temperature of any scene they enter.

When the World Looks Better Than It Sounds

The production design in Agensinkole 2 is the film’s most consistent achievement. The period detailing, the textures of the environment, the material choices for costumes and props, communicates a world that has been researched and respected. The crowds populating the kingdom feel like communities rather than staging. This matters more than it might seem: how African stories render their own historical spaces on screen is, for many watching internationally, how those spaces get imagined and remembered. The film understands this responsibility.

The direction also demonstrates a genuine improvement in staging. Characters move with intention in relation to each other, their positions in a scene communicating power and tension without needing dialogue to explain it. This is craft of a kind that Nollywood epics have not always applied with consistency, and it earns its recognition here.

The CGI has its inconsistencies, the limitations of budget rather than ambition, and they are less distracting than in the first film. The cinematography carries its visual ambitions competently. Where the technical work falls short is in the sound design. A story this deeply rooted in myth, ritual, and ancestral menace needed its audio layer to do considerably more work than it does. The score supports the mood without overreaching, which is the right instinct, but the silences between action and dialogue needed to be filled with dread, the sense of something old and powerful moving beneath the surface of the world. That atmospheric pressure is mostly absent, and its absence is felt precisely in the moments the film most needs it.

Final Thoughts

Agensinkole 2 is a film caught between what it wants to be and what its writing can sustain. The opening frames show a filmmaker aware that the legend of Agesinkole carries contemporary resonance, that injustice in a fictional Yoruba kingdom rhymes with injustice in a present-day Nigerian street. That awareness is the most exciting thing about this sequel. It is also the thing the film most thoroughly fails to honour.

The franchise has built a world worth returning to. Femi Adebayo’s Agesinkole is a genuinely compelling figure, and the cultural texture of these films, the language, the ritual, the visual grammar of pre-colonial Yoruba life, gives them a specificity that distinguishes them within Nigerian cinema. What the second film reveals is that spectacle and world-building alone cannot carry the weight of a story whose emotional and political potential has not been fully written.

The drums beat. The kingdom trembles. The reckoning arrives. But the path from premise to conclusion is not yet straight enough to make that arrival feel inevitable in the way the first film, for all its flaws, occasionally managed.

Verdict

Disappointing and mildly enjoyable. It ultimately does not live up to the standards set by the first instalment.

Rating: 1.85/5