Love Circle
Kalu Ikeagwu, Vincent Opurum, Thelma Okoduwa, Nneka Onyekuru, Sydney Diana, Paul Apel
A bachelor looking for love and someone to share his wealth with finds his missing rib in a gold-digger with ulterior motives.
Paul Apel Papel
Ngozi Okafor Nwosu
Nneka Onyekwuru
2015
The direction the storyline took
There is false advertising – when you are told that something is going to be great but ends up being everything but that – and then there is a false set-up. We can define a false set-up as a movie situation where the synopsis, poster, etc. create an impression of greatness (mind you, it never claims that it is) but the reality is very different from this. Love Circle is a false set-up.
The synopsis reads that it is about a rich billionaire who finds a woman that he wants to make his wife and despite her reluctance he succeeds in making her his wife. Then the genre goes ahead to read “romance” in order to confuse us even further. Granted, there were a few moments that can be dubbed romantic but they could all be counted on one hand.
The main focus of the story is about Kalu Ikeagwu’s character, a rich billionaire, who meets Thelma Okoduwa’s character and falls head over heels in love with her. Unknown to him, she has a poor leech of a boyfriend so she agrees to marry him in order to funnel his money to her boyfriend. This could have been the set-up for a great romantic movie, but it wasn’t. What it was, however, was not terrible but definitely did not reach its maximum potential story-wise.
Asides from the disappointment of the storyline, there are some other holes in the movie. One of the most noticeable ones is in the casting. Far be it from me to throw any shots at an individual’s personal appearance but casting Nneka Onyekuru as Kalu’s love interest did seem like a bit of a disconnect. It was hard to follow that romance angle with both of them when she looked more like she should be playing his mother than his love interest.
The performances in this movie were either really weak or just fair. There was no singular performance that stood out above the rest. The directing seemed a tad amateurish, there were obvious moments when you could tell that the director was going for some grand effect but it was obvious that many of them did not quite work out.
Altogether, Love Circle is an entertaining enough watch but it was longer than it needed to have been.
I have watched 2 films by Paul Apel and I am still waiting to be impressed