My Lovely Princess

There’s such a thing as misleading advertising in order to trick the audience to purchase your product. Then there is that unfortunate breed of misleading advertising that can hinder the progress of your product indirectly and this is one of those cases. From the title, one would assume that the movie is yet another royal movie. On the cover, you see Kenneth Okonkwo, Emeka Enyiocha, Yvonne Okoro and Chika Ike, exempting Yvonne that seems like a well grounded royal movie.

However, this movie is nothing of the sort. In fact, there is not a single princess in this movie neither is there a mention of anything near royalty. ‘My lovely princess’ is an endearing story of a beautiful family going through rough times. You know the thing about Nollywood movies is, nowadays it’s becoming harder and harder to find a good one. So when you find that good one you recognize it from the outset. So you hit pause, go finish everything else you have to do so that when you come back and press play there will be no distractions, this was one of those movies.

The story was not the most original concept under the sun, however, it was ridiculously endearing. For once, I can say that I was slightly confused as to who the secret villain was. I suspected every single character one after the other and the movie had me guessing, until it didn’t anymore.

Kenneth Okonkwo, as usual, did a fantastic job with his role but Yvonne Okoro was the star performer in this movie. Asides from Ken, one cannot help but marvel at Ms. Okoro’s brilliance. Even in a non-speaking supporting role she steal possesses the screen with every gesture. But I must add though, that even though her last name is Igbo, the lady cannot do the igbo intonations to save her life.

The one thing lacking in this movie was the acting. The acting alone was the difference between an averagely good movie to an exceedingly beautiful movie. And the two weakest links, asides from the extras were Chika Ike and Emeka Enyiocha. Usually I’m not the biggest fan of Ms. Ike however in this movie I was especially aggravated with her performances. Especially in the early scenes, watching her so called acting bounce of off Yvonne Okoro’s skills just made her performance look that much weaker. If the casting director took her and replaced her with (let me not even reach for the obvious replacement in Mercy Johnson, but even…) Chacha Eke or Nuella, the movie would have been that much better and much more emotional and I might actually have shed a tear at the end.

And then there is the thing with Emeka Enyiocha. I don’t know if he was ever a better actor but he was just not it for this movie. He had the look but his performance was just failing from scene to scene. Say his character had been given to Mike Ezuruonye, oh what a different experience it would have been.

Regardless of all of that, however, the movie was still entirely worth the watch. I’m still undecided about exactly what was the best thing about the movie was it the immaculate locations, the fact that it only had one part, or the realization  that it was not a royal movie.