Changing Tides

I hereby apologize to every romantic movie that I ever called “cliched” or “unoriginal” in the past 12-24 months because the king of unoriginality has surfaced.

Changing Tides is literally the story of a poor girl meets rich guy who somehow falls for her and they somehow end up happily ever after. I mean this movie is word for word, line for line, every cliche about boy-meets-girl meets evil-potential-mother-in-law meets rich-versus-poor that there is in the world. If ever there was a Cinderella story rule book, this movie checks all the boxes, dots all the I’s and crosses all the T’s without missing a beat, and that is not meant to be a compliment.

There is little to no character development going on in this movie. It’s as though the writer assumes that when you put a rich guy and a poor girl in a few scenes together, chemistry makes itself and emotions build themselves. Unfortunately this is not la la land so this movie fell flat on its face.

Personally, I attempt to find the silver lining in films like this but that silver lining was definitely not in the form of performances. Rukky Sanda gave her absolute worst rendition till date in this movie. By watching the movie, you feel like the entire production was a spur of the moment decision and everyone on set was feeling it. John Dumelo did not even attempt to pretend to act in this movie. I have seen better performances from him on his instagram videos with Yvonne Nelson. The entire movie was pulling itself down layer after layer and they somehow managed to ring Liz Benson into this. Assuming that this is the first time you’ve seen Liz Benson in a movie in the 2010s, it pains the heart to think that this is what she was brought out of retirement to do.

From the obvious green screen mess in the opening credits all the way to the final reconciliation in the end, the entire movie felt forced. There are a lot of empty spaces in the movie. The concept of continuity seemed entire lost on the movie makers. The performances were intermittently dry and then dull and then dry and then dull again, and on many splendid occasions it was both – dry and dull! Then there is the matter of the Ruky’s character’s mother and her facial twitching. Not sure if that was supposed to be Tourette’s because that Tourette’s was definitely still buffering and had not completely loaded.

My impression of this movie can be summed up in the dialogue from one scene between Rukky and John. In this scene, John tells her about how he had to break up with his ex because the odds were that they were going to have sickle cell anemic children if they got married. And then Rukky responds, “I can’t believe people in this time and age still believe in sickle cell?” Whhhhaaaaaaattttttttt! Did they tell you sickle cell is a myth?