Lies Men Tell

Uche Jombo’s “Lies Men Tell” is a very simple movie that comically highlights the cheating ways of three different men in three different scenarios, and the effect it has on their households and how their individual wives handle it.

It is neither a morally uplifting movie nor does it seek to teach you how to run your home. It’s just, like aforementioned, simple and funny. The end, however, is a bit uneventful if you’re looking at the movie for content; but if you are looking at it for humor then this end will suffice I assume.

Desmond Elliot in a comic role was most definitely, without a sliver of a doubt, the standout character in the movie. At first it does seem cliche and a bit overdone, the rich Igbo businessman who never lost his accent, now living in the city, now married, now has kids, but still igbotic and still chasing girls all over the place. It’s a bit cliche but that feeling wears off in no time.

My question originally was would Desmond Elliot be able to pull it off? Would he be funny? Would he be believable? Now this coming from a person who absolutely cannot stand Nollywood comedies (and some Hollywood comedies it appears), I thought Desmond Elliot’s character was hilarious. His comic timing was perfect, his comebacks were amazing, his expressions were on cue. I laughed more in this movie than I did in “Baby Oku” thanks to Mr. Elliot.

Most extras in this movie were weak but there were some pleasant surprises here and there. It’s always a joy to see Bhaira on screen (now ‘Bayray’). Bayray gives a lot and she doesn’t shy away in emotional scenes. She’s equal to the task and that’s why seeing her being paired with a weak actor in her emotional scene was a bit disappointing. Because Bayray is giving him a lot, acting-wise, and he is coming back empty. It’s very annoying to see good actors paired with bad ones.

Keira Hewatch, who I have only ever seen in “Two Brides And A Baby“, has a similar “diary-of-a-mad-black-woman” character in this movie as well but this time at least her character makes a little more sense. Keira is quite impressive in this movie and has gotten a bit better since Two Brides. There is definitely still room for improvement, but ‘improving’ she is.

It’s always a joy to see Robert Peters on screen again and Uche Jombo held down her role like only she can. A huge bone of contention for me in this movie though was the entire ‘staphylococcus’ issue. Bayray’s character and her husband go to the doctor and he tells them that she has Staph. In fact, both her and her husband have Staph. Then she immediately gets emotional and starts hitting her husband like ‘you cheating man-whore’.

And I am sitting there the entire time thinking ‘no not really’, he didn’t need to have slept with someone to give you Staphylococcus. Someone could have sneezed on you, you could have touched something, in fact you could have gotten it from the hospital, why are you hitting him? The movie portrays Staph (which by the way doctor-character, is a bacterial infection not a viral infection) as some kind of incurable, death sentence of a disease. Meanwhile, the odds of you dying from it, if you caught it on time, are very slim. Get some antibiotics, do your research, don’t upgrade a Staph infection to the same height as cancer.