Stream It Or Skip It: ‘iNumber Number: Jozi Gold’ on Netflix, the New, Rock-Solid South African Action Flick in a Growing Franchise

Action movie iNumber Number: Jozi Gold (now on Netflix) is the latest in a South African franchise that includes original 2013 film Avenged (later renamed iNumber Number) and its spinoff TV show, also titled iNumber Number. The core creative team behind the first movie and the series stays together for the latest film, including writer/director Donovan Marsh and leads S’Dumo Mtshali and Presley Chweneyagae (of Tsotsi fame), who return to play a pair of best-buddy cops working a dangerous beat in Johannesburg. This time, they follow a trail of gold thefts and dicey deals leading them to a moral crossroads that gives a bit of heft to their action-heavy adventures. 

INUMBER NUMBER: JOZI GOLD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Chili Ngcobo (Mtshali) is the baaaaaddest undercover cop around. We meet him pimped out in a bright green suit, tricked-out sunglasses and glue-on afro, out of which sticks an afro pick that’s actually a one-shot pistol. He navigates the underground as his pal Shoes Moshoeshoe (Chweneyagae) watches via a hidden camera, in one of those police vans containing a bunch of sweaty cops hunched over computers and drinking old cold cups of coffee, just waiting for shit to hit the fan. Chili waltzes into the dangerous lair of a dreadlocked crook dubbed The Hyena Man (Bongile Mantsai) who A) recently bribed his way out of criminal charges, B) has a bagful of gold nuggets he’s looking to sell, and C) keeps a cackling, snarling, frothing, vaguely convincing CGI pet hyena on a chain at all times. Just as the shit starts hitting the fan and erupting into a car chase, Shoes gets the call that his very pregnant wife is in labor and being wheeled into the hospital. Ain’t that always the case? 

The bust goes tits up. And on top of that, the gold in the bag is fake. Iron pyrite. Fool’s gold. It’s the type of situation that gets a couple of cops booted by their corrupt-ass boss (Brenda Ngxoli) down to the basement to work with the White detectives who were very good at their jobs during the Apartheid era, led by a hard-bitten character named Van Zyl (Deon Lotz). Fed up with all the corruption in his department, Chili turns in his badge (I think he lost his Afro pick gun, so he can’t turn that in too) but ends up helping out in Shoes and Van Zyl’s attempt to bust a group of criminals known as The Gold Gang, who’re heisting gold and pressing Krugerrands that are making the rounds about town. Curious. 

So is Chili still a cop or what? Can’t tell, but he’s on the case, all garbed up in undercover mode to infiltrate the Gang, which consists of three siblings and their mother, who knows how to operate a Krugerrand-pressing machine, which seems like a highly selective but in this case highly pragmatic skill. Here’s the thing: Chili tosses his wire and joins The Gold Gang, not just because they’re fun to party with, but because they’re distributing those Krugerrands to poor people instead of hoarding all the dough. They’re modern-day Robin Hoods, bruh, swiping from “legit” scumbags and redistributing the wealth to people struggling in the favelas, e.g., the gent who runs the orphanage where Chili and Shoes met as boys, and also happens to be broke and on the brink of being shut down. Oh man,  no wonder Chili finds himself in quite the ethical conundrum, torn between his loyalty to Shoes, who maintains his good-copness to support his growing family, and the gold-hearted Gold Gang, whose shenanigans inevitably lead to further tangles with the Hyena Man and the corrupt-ass police chief. Suffice to say, this all won’t be resolved without a fair amount of violence.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Marsh is clearly inspired by Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino (the first iNumber film drew comparisons to Reservoir Dogs, and the new movie keeps the trend alive by depositing a gut-shot character in the backseat of a car for an inordinate amount of time). 

Performance Worth Watching: There’s not much to these characters, but you can tell Mtshali and Chweneyagae have developed some nicely broken-in chemical rapport after two films and a season of TV.

Memorable Dialogue: Van Zyl wields a metaphor as a piece of advice: “Don’t use a short stick to scratch a big lion’s balls.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Jozi Gold will never be accused of being highly original, but it’s nevertheless a modestly enjoyable slab of entertainment buoyed by its two leads, a handful of splashy supporting characters and plenty of stylish action. Even pushing the two-hour mark, Marsh makes sure the story moves quickly and efficiently, and doesn’t bite off more than it can chew conceptually. It’s a classic case of bad guys who are actually good and good guys who are actually bad, and the upstanding guys who are caught between what’s hands-down morally right and the self-dealing crumbums who enforce the law. It delivers a couple of solid plot twists down the line to reward us for paying attention. And it doesn’t take a hardlined moral stand beyond hey, you can’t just let the orphanage close because what’ll happen to all those kids what don’t got no parents, which is a touch corny but ultimately winning, because it produced a couple of good dudes with goofy names like Chili and Shoes. 

Granted, Marsh wears his influences on his sleeve, with Ritchie-esque flashbacks and blatant co-opting of the soundtrack cues Tarantino co-opted from grindhouse guilty pleasures and old Westerns. Ngxoli’s leaping-from-the-screen performance could stand to be reigned in, and the hyena stuff, well, I hope it’s supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, because it’s a hoot. The film can be a bit overstylized at points, and shows its budgetary restraints by sometimes substituting shaky-cam and flurries of edits for choreographed action, but Marsh makes the most of what he’s got. One shouldn’t draw comparison between South African cinema and big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas, but hey, give me iNumber Number’s scrappy charms over another dumbass Fast/Furious bloatflick any day. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. iNumber Number: Jozi Gold is a rock-solid, entertaining action movie with a couple of modestly engaging ideas at its core. It’s not breaking new ground in the cinematic arts, but then again, nobody should be asking it to.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.