Just Married

I was really excited about Just Married because as love stories go a lot has been explored before the wedding and not enough for the time period after the wedding (aka the actual marriage). Of the few that we’ve seen, we get a lot of influence from external forces. However, a purely unadulterated love story about two married people who have to learn to like themselves and then to love themselves, there isn’t too many in nollywood.

Asides from not having many of the post-wedding marriage stories there’s hardly any that has been executed beautifully. Unfortunately Just Married is not an exception to this either.

Just married is the story of two rich kids who are forced into a marriage by their parents. It’s a great idea to explore what happens in those love stories that usually include two rich parents who want their kids together. But what happens after their kids get together and they do not like each other? That’s “Just Married” or at least, that’s what Just Married hoped to be.

The qualms with this project were not so much in the storyline because the idea was great and the steps towards the end seemed cohesive but it falls apart somewhere in production and on the way to the screen. The writer does a good job of setting up the dislike between the two individuals, and she even manages the feat of letting the audience feel the point when their emotions towards each other start to change, when they start getting fed up of fighting and want to try to make their marriage work.

Things that brought it down at this point would be poor acting from the extra characters. I say “characters” but I just mean one, in the person of Charles Billion. His character, Jide, had such an important role in switching up the dynamic but his lacklustre performances distracts away from the story and forces you to instead focus on “woow, this guy really cannot act”.

Asides from this (and the very shabbily done “just married’ plates on the wedding limo), one thing that really drops the quality of this movie is the music. The writer was going somewhere and I wish the combination of the film editor and the music director had more fate in the writing than they did. Instead, they tried to fill the moments with magnificent (and mostly unnecessary) amounts of music. If you take away the dramatic nature of the music in many of the scenes and just let the story and the actors lead, the movie could have gotten so much further. There were scenes that weren’t even dramatic but had the most dramatic music playing in it. It’s at times like this that you appreciate Shirley Frimpong-Manso’s style.

In the end, Just Married misses the mark of greatness because it never lets the emotions come off organically. In its attempt to “force it” and its lack of fate in the audience, writer and actors it falls short of what could have been a movie with actual feelings.