5 Brides

Nowadays, it seems that all of the production houses I had originally thought could do no wrong are trying as hard as possible to prove that wrong.

From the cover, synopsis and intro, 5 brides is a movie that appeals to all your senses (well except taste maybe). It seems flamboyant, colorful and elegant, and supported with music by Bernie Anti and such immaculate sets it appears to be the ultimate escape from your everyday life. Well… that’s until the actors are introduced.

The movie revolves around 5 Brides and the different conflicts in their homes and personal lives. It’s really nothing original, but then again I don’t think many go into this movie expecting originality. With a Venus Films movie, the base expectation is usually quite simple – to be entertained. And whilst this movie, is arguably entertaining in its framework and the actual stories behind the film, the depiction of this other world as brought to life by the actors does nothing but disappoint.

I am all for launching new talent and I believe it is more than courageous to push a movie with a 99.9% cast of new faces. It sounds amazing in theory, but it’s difficult in practice. The difficulty of the entire process, ideally, should fade when the entire work comes together and all things fall into place. However, instead of falling into place the entire thing seemed to fall out of place with this movie.

The cast made up of mostly pretty faces and boys with accents were unfortunately not enough to keep the movie going. I could go into detail on each member of the cast but the fact remains that there was barely any acting going on in this movie, and all (ok, maybe ‘most’) involved were merely reciting their dialogues on screen.

The only person worth watching was Bismark Odoi, the comic relief, and this is coming from a person who can’t stand African-movie comedy.

That aside, the sets, the props, the costumes, the color, the vibrancy you would expect of a Venus Film production was definitely not lacking in this movie because you can trust Frank to deliver on everything about a movie except the core of the movie itself.