Mad Couple

Mad Couple had the appeal of a family movie with the usual list of flaws: overly prolonged scenes, some actors in minor roles that didn’t know how to act, a cyclical redundant storyline, unoriginal plot and themes as well as lasting too long to be palatable. But again, as with most other family movies, I still liked it.

Mad couple tells the story of Chiamaka – played by Mercy Johnson, a village girl who got admission into a ‘school of medicine’. Whilst there she meets an undermotivated man that she falls in love with. He assists her by paying for her tuition and she assists him by doing his school work. Chiamaka has a childhood friend who dropped out of secondary school and never made it to the university because she got pregnant. Her pregnancy is a source of shame for her mother in the society and most of this shame-throwing is done by Chiamaka’s mother.

The movie spirals down the predictable with little or no space of originality. Regardless of the predictable framework it’s still a nice watch although you do have to fastforward many-a-scenes that just did not know when to end.

Mercy Johnson as Chiamaka was effortless and Uche Odoputa found a way to convince me that he was a university aged student. Some of the madness scenes were amusing, others were annoying because they refused to end. At a certain point I thought even I was going to go mad from watching all the madness ensuing on screen. The perpetrator of all the evil in the end gets the usual nollywood punishment.

One of the most annoying aspects of the movie for me, however, was the soundtrack. The soundtrack was nonsense. I mean it was utter foolishness. Plain rubbish. But at the end of the four hours, I was singing along because I had been bamboozled by it so many times throughout the length of the movie that by the end the silly lyrics were embedded in my memory.

There’s nothing really new about this movie except the fact that family movies are scarce nowadays and the occasional offering, no matter how unoriginal, is greatly appreciated.