30 Years A Virgin

Cloaked as a comedy at base and a romantic comedy at best, 30 Years A Virgin twists and turns so many times that it’s hard to find a genre to peg it under.

It starts off as the story of a 30 year old virgin with a philanderer for an older brother. At its most innocent, it’s a younger brother asking for his elder brother’s help when he meets the girl he believes to be the one. At its darkest, 30 years a virgin is a story of deep-seethed hatred of many years manifesting in the step-by-step plan by the unforgiving child.

It’s hard to balance not giving away much while still reviewing the movie. This is because the movie presents itself as one thing but it is only truly that one thing for about 15 minutes of this 2hr 20 minute film. Hence…

SPOILER ALERT 

It turns out that big brother tries to sabotage younger brother and succeeds by telling him to switch up his character and become someone different. At this point, you begin to wonder how Carl, the younger brother played by Bobby Obodo, made it so many years while being such a dunce. It’s a bit offensive to virgins actually because it creates the image of naive virgins (hello… ever heard of Yvonne Orji).

In the end, big brother, played by Bolanle Ninalowo, swoops in and gets the girl while the younger brother watches. A huge part of every single viewer watching this movie is thinking, ‘there’s no way he loves her. He’s just doing all this to get in her pants”. However, as the scenes progress you truly believe that he loves her and that’s one thing Bolanle, the writer, and director do well. They convey this effortlessly without any hints at what is to come in the end. Such that the viewer begins to feel like a horrible pessimist for doubting the character’s love.

And then things switch up.There’s the robbery, there’s the rape and there’s the healing and the pregnancy. In all of this you are still convinced that everyone is innocent and bad things are just happening to them. Tana’s character goes from being in love with big brother and falling for Carl. This “love transfer” (as I’ve decided to call it for this movie) is one of many but is possibly the best done one.

As the movie continues, Tana’s character shows herself to simply be a toy ball in the hands of these brothers that just continuously bounces in whichever direction the wind blows. It becomes even more annoying after Carl is convicted and she just easily falls into the hands of big brother again. Shuo! Do you not remember yourself kneeling and begging him? Even being dragged under his feet after he blames you for your own rape? Really though…

And again things turn around when Tana’s character discovers that big brother is actually the real culprit. That one scene in the dark was the most pivotal but possibly the least well enacted. It was the one scene where Bolanle and Tana’s characters had to deliver at peaks. Bolanle had to show his true aggression and Tana had to show strength through weakness and they both earned glaring F9’s in that performance. In the end that scene ended up coming off as an interview sequence where Tana’s character is asking Bolanle to fill us all in on all the holes that were empty in the movie.

Should we mention the shoddy graphics in both of the car accident scenes? No right? Let’s respect ourselves cos there was no way that was not intended as comic relief.

However, the movie is not all fail. In the first half, Tana, Bolanle and Bobby really do well enough in portraying their characters. It’s just that by the second half their performances become very tired.

The music in this movie was very well placed and quite properly used. There were argument scenes between the brother where Bobby and Bolanle’s performances alone could never have taken the movie to where it needed to be, but Ava Momoh’s music comes in and elevates the scene. It doesn’t fill it. It doesn’t force it. It just elevates the quality without taking away from the work of the actors.

The movie was quite long and tried to do a lot. However, it succeeded with most of the things it did in the first half. By the second half, things get rushed, actors get lazy, and in the middle of all of this the writer is still determined to insert twists on top of twists on top of twists.