Angelina

ANGELINA is a three part long six hour movie about everything that “A Cry for Help” was about. It stars Hilda Dokubo doing what Hilda Dokubo always does – crying. It has a villain, it has a sob story, it has a success story and when all else fails it has a voodoo angle. Regardless of all this, I loved it!

Angelina tells the story of a family without a male child. After 20 years of marriage and two grown daughters – one of which is chubby and the other of which is an illiterate, the husband has had enough. In his quest to find a male child he marries another wife meanwhile his wife turns out to also be pregnant. You’d think it’d end there right? She’d give birth to a boy. New wife is thrown out because she’s obviously evil – I mean she is the new wife and they are always evil right?

But it doesn’t end there. And this is not much because none of our prior predictions were true. On the contrary, most of your predictions are good. It just turns out to be that Angelina – in its grand three partedness – is more like three different sob-stories (sob as in tears, that was not a typo) in one with one grand final – though unrealistic – happy ending.

It was marvelous for me to see: 1) the return of Hilda Dokubo (now, let’s get her in a movie with Nkiru too) 2) Funke Akindele in a sad/oppressed role 3) Eniola Badmus in an oppressed role as opposed to being the oppressor. That final one was definitely one I didn’t see coming. However, of all three, the most appealing was seeing Funke Akindele in a sad/oppressed role and her ability to pull it off well.

The movie is predictable, it is unoriginal, it is implausible but it is also warm, endearing and easy to watch. After six hours, you have no choice but to feel a connection to the characters and an innate hatred for the villains. You hate whoever the protagonist hates and love whoever the protagonist loves such that by the end you just might not mind an extra 20 minutes of just watching the ‘happily ever after’ portion.

Angelina is no foray into the new but it feels like a blast from the past. The old nollywood that it seems like most are running quickly to be separated from is not always as bad as it seems. It’s what we loved about Nollywood movies – the happy feeling you get at the end of the six hours after the villain is finally defeated and the victim arises gloriously and well… they all lived happily ever after.