Stranger Than Ever

Sometimes the supporting characters in a movie can come from behind and take over the movie and this was one of those situations. Dare I say, that without the characters of Abel (played by Kelechi Udegbe) and his wife (played by Ijeoma Grace Agu), this movie would have been more difficult to sit through… especially with all the screaming and shouting on Belinda’s part. 

Stranger Than Ever really is a strange little story. A runs girl looses her phone in the back seat of a hired cab and the next passenger, a banker, finds it. When he calls to return it she yells rudely at him so he hatches a plot to exact his revenge on her.

Even a legally blind man can tell you where the movie is headed from this point on but the refreshing part, as far as originality and predictability go, is the beginning. It’s in the way they met but not so much in their moments together. It’s not so much in their moments together because that very lightly explored in this movie. It was explored lightly enough that we know that they met each other and that they quasi-like each other, but not explored enough for us to fall for them both or have sympathy towards their love that is bound to develop in the end. But then again, there’s only so much time that the movie has allotted.

The originality though is in the writing of the supporting characters such that that they don’t just feel like aimless and obvious comic relief but instead feel integral to the storyline. It’s in the writing of the relationship so it doesn’t feel like yet another “pretty woman” but actually makes you wonder what’s wrong with Fred. It’s in the random insertion of the side note that main character was quitting his bank job to become a farmer. It’s almost like the movie was being sponsored by an agricultural union that needed promotion because otherwise I’m not really sure what the importance of this farming bit was to the storyline. 

After the turning point scene, the movie does slow down a bit but not dreadfully so. It’s an easy watch with characters that are easy to love and in the end it ends like you’d expect it to.