Broken Mirror

Broken Mirror has the makings of a really luxurious car at the auction. From the outside it all seems quite spectacular, and even inside it has all the basic makings: the seats, the steering, the brakes, however, all the extra ‘luxury’ that makes this a luxury car are not functioning.

The movie begins with amazing potential. The stuff that Sunday afternoon lunch time flicks are made of. There is an endearing young couple struggling through poverty. James Gardiner and Jackie Appiah play the young couple who have been together for much too long according to the girl’s friends. “One does not simply invest that much into a man” her friends say, and yet she does. Eventually it pays off and James’ character hits it big. It is at this point that things begin to crumble – for the storyline and for the movie. There were a few things that were unnecessary or some emotions that should have been felt more strongly but were not.

The movie could have started and ended in one part but that addition of the second part seemed to have given the story writer more space than he or she knew what to do with it. It was a well oiled engine that lost its way along the line.

Now I do not know if the movie was making any attempts at keeping the identity of the villain a secret because it was quite evident. Granted, it wasn’t who we had initially expected. But it’s quite the nollywood ‘trick’ to pull that twist out of the bag. Present to us someone we would suspect as the bad guy and then make the good guy bad, it’s a twist that has been used so much that now I am not even sure it classifies as a twist.

The main flaw of the movie was the addition of the extra part adding more time to the story than they knew what to do with, so much so that at the end of the final part we have about twenty minutes of no dialogue-sad music type scenes before the final resolution and the happily ever after.

There it goes, we know what’s going to happen in these movies and for the most part the holding force for this movie was the comic relief from Fred Amugi’s character, which I will admit was extraneous at some point but at most points it was the only thing to watch. The movie spirals down the stereotypical path with not much for the viewers to hold onto. It is a very ‘usual’ type of movie, no surprises here.

The performances in this movie were enough to carry it through. There were no surprising great performances nor were there any astonishingly terrible ones.