Finding Love

Finding love is one big misguided mess with so many areas with potentials for greatness that end up falling short because someone involved in production did not follow through.

The movie tells different anecdotes of different modern day relationships and how they eventually fall short. These stories are told with Denrele as the narrator. This already starts off as a movie with potential, that plus the cast line-up almost convinces the viewer that you are in for a treat. In reality though, it is far from that.

The first anecdote is of a rich girl-poor guy situation starring Luclay of BBA fame. The only entertaining bit about this anecdote was the part when I realized that that was the infamous Luclay (obviously, I don’t watch Big Brother Africa). Every other part of this story was rife with poor acting and sub par story telling.

The next storyline introduces Kiki Omeili’s character. Her character falls for a hair salon owner who proposes to her but turns out to be homosexual and she finds out when she catches him in bed with her brother. This story gave me a little bit more hope. It was not as overstretched and horrifying (acting quality wise) as the first story and it was actually entertaining with some decent performances.

Then came the next storyline of a sugar daddy and his sugar baby, played by Oluchy Sylvia. Now Oluchy is simply fire whenever she is on screen and I dare say she competed with Denrele for the most energetic performance in this movie. This story glided by smoothly for two reasons, the first being Oluchy’s immersive performance and the second being the fact that it did not last long enough for us to get over Oluchy’s performance and notice anything else.

The fourth storyline is that of a celebrity, his baby mama and his girlfriend. The celebrity is played by Bryan Okwara and his girlfriend by Mary Lazarus. This storyline was also quite entertaining and the performances, though not the best, were adequate enough to make the scenes go by.

The final story seemed to have been cut and paste to fill time but it tells the story of an African girl who marries a Caucasian man. The lady is played by Uru Eke and I assume that the storyline is intending to show how cultural conflicts might arise during the marriage. But forgive me if I don’t think pap vs. cornflakes and listening to p-square versus watching the news are necessarily issues that only arise in culture clash marriages or that these are grounds for divorce. I am certain the story had a point but the story was not carried out far enough for us to arrive at this point.

The downfall of this movie was definitely the initial storyline which was not only the weakest plot, but also starred the weakest actors and lasted the longest amount of time. Every consecutive story after that was better and more tolerable. The production quality of the movie could have used some help. One can complain that the stories lacked finality but I argue that it was not necessary for this movie to conclude the stories especially considering the context.

So watch this movie for Denrele and Oluchy but skip the first 30 minutes!