The Intervention

If you read the synopsis then you could see the end coming from a mile away (because well we’ve seen a semblance of this already in “A Little White Lie” and Jennifer Eliogu starred in that too) but I was still excited… because why not?

The Intervention is the story of a rich young man who hires a young lady to pose as a girlfriend for his parents’ visit over the weekend. Our young man, played by Bolanle Ninalowo, falls for the young lady/baker/orphan/my-life-is-so-sad-but-I-am-a-hustler-and-I-work-hard-for-mine, played by Chelsea Eze.

When the opening credits rolled along, the color, the lights and the playful nature of the graphics were exciting but scene one didn’t seem to carry along that same enthusiasm. From opening credit to opening scene, our colors got sombre and our light was lost and it did not get better until the absolute end of the movie.

There were many points during the movie in which the poor lighting became upsetting because it made potentially great looking scenes come off as ‘barely ok’, but that was barely the beginning. The poor lighting leads you into the inconsistent audio quality, the unbelievable props and the background music that sounds like random strokes of piano keys but in the end you realize what it is. It is a low budget movie making the best of the resources available to it.

An hour into the movie, either we get over the quality or we adjust to it and we simmer into the storyline. You expect certain things to happen – like for our main leads to fall for each other – but you don’t notice it happen until the character MJ mentions to Arriet that “You are falling for him”. At that moment in the movie, we hadn’t seen anything in the earlier parts to prove that statement true but I guess she must be falling for him because it was bound to happen eventually.

It is a very cute story that is made even cuter by its performances. Jennifer Eliogu is definitely standout in this movie. She makes everything she is in so much more watchable and so much more alive (I only wished there was better lighting to appreciate the life she injected into the movie). Bolanle and Chelsea as our main leads did well enough selling the character to us but the production quality crippled the movie and turned a potentially memorable story into much less.