Gateman

Day by day, I realize how much one really cannot trust the hype on these irokotv movie comments. I clicked on this one and read so much praise, you would have thought that Nigerians have made “Avatar”. Needless to say though, this review is not based on the comments.

Gateman is the story of a rich man’s son who returns home to take over his father’s business. He, however, decides to start small in the ‘lowliest’ position in the company – a gateman. He does this, according to him, in order to be able to see people’s true characters.

So we already know how this one is going. There’s a saint, there’s a jerk and there’s a turn of events. Here are the problems though.

The movie really does make you raise an eyebrow from the moment you press play. I guess you expect it because it is a Divine Touch production, but it is 2017 and I did not realize that we still had opening credits of movies last a whole five minutes of screen-time where absolutely nothing else is happening but shuffling of names. And then should we mention the soundtrack…?

Eventually we get into the movie and you are immediately met with the side effects of a low budget. We have people talking big to creae a certain image but the image you see doesn’t necessarily match it. You might have to tweak your brain a bit in order to believe that anyone is as rich as they claim to be considering the sets and the props and other things in between.

And then we enter the crux of the story. Our male lead, played by Bolanle Ninalowo, is now a gateman – who for some reason is incapable of buttoning up his shirt and also seems to think it is okay to arrive at the same time as the rest of the staff (bruh, who do you think is going to open the gate for them?). On his first day on the job, he meets the girl of his dreams – of course – who works in the HR department but everyone on scene decides to call her HR instead for the rest of the movie (as in… we’re just calling the chic Human Resources at this point? ok o).

Once you get past the many eyebrow raising moments (and also get past the performance of Benedict Johnson – who seems to always be playing the same character), you realize that the movie really is not all bad. It is sweet. It is cute and even though it is 2.25 hours long, it races by. The actors do a decent enough job of bringing the characters to life. You eventually get into it and it feels less scripted and more like you are a part of their lives and watching it go by. By the time the end comes around, it’s hard to believe it has already been greater than 2 hours. The movie is just stopped short of reaching its potential due to production inadequacies.